Lost Boy Lost Girl

Mark’s proposal delighted Jimbo, who wished to stay as far as possible from the man whose eyes had found him through his father’s binoculars. And although by going to Sherman Park they would undoubtedly be breaking the letter of their vows—they might as well be honest about it—the meaning, the soul, of the vows remained intact, since the presence of half a dozen cops like Officers Rote and Selwidge guaranteed the continued well-being of any adolescent within a hundred-foot radius of the fountain. Actually, their parents should have been begging them to spend their evenings in Sherman Park.

Up the alley they went, Jimbo feeling a happy relief at the return of their customary occupations. So much of the past few days had the flavor of dreamlike confinement in someone else’s irrational designs. Now he felt an unexpected lightness of spirit, as if he had been set free in a restored world.

On West Auer Avenue, a man in a gray University of Michigan football T-shirt, gray cotton shorts, and flip-flops was washing a dark blue Toyota Camry in his short double-wheel-track driveway. Heavy-looking muscles stood out on his arms and legs while he scrubbed the Camry’s hood. As the boys approached, he looked toward them and smiled. Helplessly, they fell into their homeboy stroll.

“Ah, youngbloods,” the man said. “How y’all doin’ tonight?”

“Hangin’ in there,” Jimbo said.

The man leaned against his car and smiled at them. “That seems to be working out just fine. Be sure to take care of yourselves, all right?”

The day was still hot, and the shops still stood open. Bored clerks lounged against counters, sneaking looks at their watches. Widely separated cars trolled along the boulevard. The only other people on their side of the street were an old woman bent nearly parallel to the sidewalk and a man who recently had been thrown out of a liquor store. He was aiming punches at a parking meter. The old woman carried a string bag containing a single head of iceberg lettuce.

“I’d really like to get out of this nowhere town,” Mark said. “I should e-mail my uncle Tim and ask if I could come to New York and stay in his place.”

“Would he let you?”

“Sure he would, I think. Why wouldn’t he?”

Jimbo shrugged. A second later, he said, “Maybe I could come with you.”

“Maybe,” Mark agreed. “Or I could just go and send you a postcard.”

“You fathead skell.”

“No, you’re a fathead skell,” Mark said, and for a time the two of them sniggered like children.

“A lot of great-looking women live in New York. They’re all over the place, bro. They’re lining up at every Starbucks in the city.”

“Yo, and what would you do with them?”

“I know what to do,” Jimbo said.

“You know what to do with your right hand.”

“I didn’t hear any complaints from Ginny Capezio,” Jimbo said.

“Ginny Capezio? Give me a break. She’s so hopeless, she’d go down on that guy.” He waved toward the rummy, who had finished punishing the parking meter and seemed now to be looking for a soft place to lie down.

Virginia “Ginny” Capezio had administered brisk oral sex to a number of the boys in Quincy’s ninth grade, among them Jimbo but not Mark. According to Ginny, oral sex did not count as actual sex.

“You’re jealous, that’s all,” said Jimbo.

He was jealous, Mark silently admitted, but of Jackie Monaghan, not his son. Also of everybody who had ever had sex with an attractive, or even a semi-attractive, woman. Ginny Capezio had fat legs and the disconcerting beginnings of a mustache, which her father forbade her to remove. Mark did not suppose that his inventions concerning a gorgeous and brilliant girl named Molly Witt, who after having been universally desired at Quincy had left the previous year, had ever convinced Jimbo. Mark wasn’t even sure why he had lied about Molly Witt. It had happened in a weak moment, and after that he was stuck with it. Fortunately, they now reached the street corner diagonally across from the park’s entrance, and checking the traffic to make sure they could run across the street without waiting for the light to change gave him an excuse to ignore Jimbo’s remark.

They trotted across the street, and the same thought floated into two heads, that they should have brought their skateboards. The paths and benches, in themselves no less suitable for skateboards than the building site’s ramps, converged at the wide, curved bowl of the fountain, which was large enough for some halfway serious fun.

Knowing nothing of the shadows gathering about them, the boys began walking toward the fountain on the broad, long path, imagining their skateboards bumping and rumbling over the grooved stone flags. Imagined pleasure would be all the pleasure to be enjoyed at Sherman Park that evening: a small group of boys in baggy jeans perched on the lip of the fountain, ignored by two police officers who appeared to be talking to their girlfriends on their cell phones but were probably engaged in official business.

To look upon this scene was depressing; to join it would have been unthinkable. In a single shared gesture, the boys wheeled around and drifted toward the nearest bench. One of the policemen gave the boys a quantifying once-over.

Jimbo jumped to his feet and said, “What are we going to do?”

“I think I’ll go home,” Mark said. “I don’t feel very good.”

They returned the way they had come, past the nearly empty stores and the rows of houses beside driveways leading nowhere. The athletic-looking man washing his Camry waved as they passed him, and they waved back. They turned into the alley and walked the fifty feet to the Monaghans’ backyard.

“Want to come in?” Jimbo asked.

“Not now,” Mark said. “Tomorrow, we’ll hack around on our boards, okay?”

“Okay.” Jimbo pretended to punch Mark’s stomach, grinned, and jogged across the backyard to his kitchen door.

Mark waited until Jimbo had gone inside before continuing down the alley. At its southern end, he turned right onto Townsend, then right again onto Michigan Street, where he walked slowly up the block on the west side of the street, checking the porches for people who might see what he was about to do.

If someone had asked Mark what he intended to do, he would have said, I want to test the air.

Satisfied that no one was watching him, he moved at twice his normal pace up to the property line at 3323, glanced quickly at the other side of the street, spun around and raced over the tilting lawn. When he had run past the side of the house and veered toward the backyard, he stopped short, startled by what he was looking at.

For the first time, Mark realized that the other residents of Michigan Street had been mowing the areas of the lawn visible from the street. Behind the house, the lawn had disappeared beneath a riot of tall weeds and field grass. Queen Anne’s lace and tiger lilies shone within the waist-high growth. Circles of dead leaves and gray mulch surrounded the bases of the giant oak trees. Mark felt as if suddenly he had been transported to another country. Insects buzzed. As soon as he waded into the tangle, a small animal exploded into motion near his right foot and scurried deeper into the tall grass. Startled by what had been done to the rear of the house, he scarcely noticed the ruckus. It had been modified out of all recognition. He realized that he was looking at what the eight-foot concrete wall had been built to conceal.

Alongside the kitchen on the uphill side of the house, someone had added a strikingly eccentric structure. To Mark, the addition only barely suggested the existence of anything that could be considered a room, but a room he supposed it had to be: a room like a space in a steeply pitched attic. The roofline dropped to within three feet of the ground and met a short exterior wall. It looked like the side of a big, big pup tent made of roofing tiles. He could not imagine why anyone would build such a thing—a long, windowless room pinched down into itself by a steeply slanting roof.

In the few moments since he had come around the side of the house, the air had truly darkened. Hasten hasten, night comes on. Mark pushed through the tall field grass, and the tiger lilies bobbed their heads. Another little life shot panicked away from his foot. A dry, jungly odor of rot arose from a clump of bindweed.

Close up, the added room proved to be ill-constructed and in need of repair. Nothing quite lined up or lay flat. Long chips of paint had flaked off the boards alongside the kitchen door. Mark went up three broken steps and peered through a narrow glass panel. A layer of gray dust kept him from seeing any more than the vague shapes of the counters and the arched entrance, identical to that in his house, to the dining room. The arch carved in the wall looked like a trick of perspective. He rattled the doorknob.

The air around him had advanced another stage toward nightfall, though the sky was still almost bright. Mark peeled the topmost shirt off his body and wrapped it around his right fist. He had been seeing himself do this since leaving Jimbo; now it felt as though he were acting mechanically, without volition. Hurry hurry, little boy, do your worst, dark dark night approacheth. He punched the narrow window with his padded hand. Shards of dusty glass flew inward, clattered tinkling to the floor, and burst into fragments. So softly he barely noticed, something odd and as physical as a smell streamed through the broken window and fastened on him. Jagged sections of broken glass clung to the sides of the frame, and these he snapped off with sharp, efficient raps of his hand. He unrolled the T-shirt from his hand, brushed off shards of glass, draped it around his neck, and reached in. His fingers found the doorknob, which felt simultaneously gritty and sticky, almost greasy. He revolved the knob, unlocking the door, and withdrew his arm. Then he opened the door the width of a boy’s slender body and, in accord with the plans he had decided upon hours earlier, slipped into the dark kitchen.

For a second or two, he was able to register a sense of emptiness and neglect that suggested absolute abandonment. On the wall to his left, he took in a closed door that must have opened into the pup-tent room. Then whatever had settled on him after he broke the window clamped down like a vise. His eyes failed, and he found that he could not draw breath. Hopelessness and misery thickened around him like a reeking cloud. His stomach and his bowels churned. What had invaded him? Frantic with disgust, Mark cried out. He could barely hear his own voice. When one of his hands struck the back door, he whirled toward it. As if the door had come violently to life, it rapped his chest and his elbow. Layer upon layer of stinking gauze seemed to drift like spider webs down upon him. His right hand blessedly found the doorknob. He thrust himself through the frame and slammed the door behind him. Invisible webs and filaments seemed to float out in pursuit. When he wiped his eyes, the sight of his hands—trembling, so pale!—informed him that his vision had returned.

11

“Oh, you heard me talking to Jackie Monaghan about that ‘heroism’ business?” Philip asked. “Believe me, there’s no point in talking about that subject.”

“Humor me,” Tim said. “Tom Pasmore mentioned it the other day, but he didn’t know the whole story.”

The brothers were driving east on Burleigh in Tim’s swan boat, to which Philip had agreed both for the sake of comfort and on the grounds that riding in the passenger seat allowed him to scan the sidewalks more effectively. Three hours earlier, the radio announcement about Dewey Dell had given him leave to swap the agony of hope suspended for the comfort of despair, but believing that his son was dead did not release him from the obligation to act as though Mark might still be at large. After Tim had driven twice around Sherman Park, expanding his circle outward, Philip overruled his plan of making a third, wider circuit by telling him to drive toward the lake.

He pretended to scrutinize a group of teenagers hanging out in front of a drugstore. At last he looked back at Tim. “Heroism! That’s a laugh. Really. Nancy’s family was a lot of things, but heroic was never part of the deal.” He took his eyes from Tim and seemed to look at the windshield instead of through it. “You ought to do background checks on everybody related to the person you think you want to marry, that’s all I can say.”

“You have to admit,” Tim said, “it’s an odd twist in the Joseph Kalendar story.”

“Everything about Joseph Kalendar’s story is twisted. I can’t believe you didn’t know about this. I guess it all came up while you were still frisking around in the Far East. The guy was a good carpenter, but everything else about him was crazy. Kalendar raped and murdered a bunch of women, and he killed his own son. He probably killed his wife, too, so he could have a nice, empty house to play in.”

“What year are we talking about?”

“Kalendar was arrested in 1979, 1980, I can’t remember which. Turn south on Humboldt and get on Locust. We’ll drive past that little park over there.”

“You want me to drive to the East Side?”

“You never know,” Philip said, meaning that it was impossible to predict where a teenage boy might go when he ran away from home.

“Did you and Nancy ever get together with the Kalendars? He was her first cousin, after all.”

Philip shook his head. “I hardly knew the guy existed until one day Nancy told me that his wife had come over to see her. This was when we were living in Carrollton Gardens. Way west. What a mistake. I hated it out there. Bunch of snobs talking about golf and money.”

“Kalendar’s wife went to see Nancy? When was that?”

“Around ’72, something like that. It was winter—a miserable winter. We’d only been married about two years. When I got home from work, Nancy was very upset. She refused to talk about it. Then she finally ’fessed up, said her cousin’s wife had been out to see her. I don’t remember the woman’s name, something like Dora, Flora, who knows? She probably wanted money. Of course Nancy knew better than to give her any. We were thinking about starting a family, and I would have hit the ceiling if Nancy had given my hard-earned money away to her fruitcake cousin.”

“And Nancy was upset.”

“Very. Very disturbed about the whole thing.”

“Did she seem guilty to you?”

“That’s one way to put it. Guilty and upset. Stay away from those people, I said. Don’t ever let them come out here again.”

“Did you ever meet Kalendar?”

Philip shuddered.

“Nancy must have known him, though, at least during her childhood.”

“Yeah, sure, she knew him. I guess he was sort of okay as a kid, but he started to get weird pretty soon. The trouble was, nobody knew how weird. Nancy said this thing about him once—after he got arrested. She said it was scary just being with him.”

“How?”

“Nancy said he made you feel like all the air was sucked out of the room. Nobody ever knew what happened to his wife. I bet he killed her, too, and got rid of the body. For sure, she disappeared.”

“How long was that after she came out to see Nancy?”

Philip looked at him in surprised speculation. “Four, five weeks. Nancy called them in the middle of the day, hoping he was out in this little workshop he rented on Sherman Boulevard. But Kalendar answered, said he had no idea where she was. Myra, that was her name! Dumb bitch, you have to feel sorry for her, hitching up with a guy like that.”

“Still, there was the heroism thing.”

Philip laughed. “The first time Joe Kalendar got famous. We’re getting close to Shady Mount Hospital. Turn left. Let’s drive north for a while.”

Tim thought that Philip wanted to wind up on Eastern Shore Drive, where the spectacle of mansions inhabited by people whose children were legacies at Brown and Wesleyan would further divert him from the reality of his situation. He was looking for distraction, not Mark. Philip had given up; now he was merely waiting for the police to find the body.

“Happened back when I was first getting to know Nancy. The summer I was nineteen, 1968. Of course, you wouldn’t know anything at all about this stuff, you were away killing Commies for Christ, weren’t you?”

Tim smiled. “Most of the guys in my platoon liked to call ’em gooks.”

“Slants,” Philip said. “Slopes.”

“You know, you could always tell people you were there.”

“Sometimes I do,” Philip said.

“I’m sure,” Tim said. “Anyhow, Kalendar saved the lives of two children?”

“The story was all over the local paper. The house next to his, a plug shorted out and bang, electrical fire. It was like six in the morning. It takes about ten minutes for the whole house to fill up with smoke. Joe Kalendar happened to be messing around in his backyard, and I guess he smelled the smoke or something.”

“He’s messing around in his backyard at six o’clock in the morning?”

“Maybe he was having a fresh-air pee. Who knows?”

“Who lived in the other house?”

“A black family—two little girls. Guy was a bus driver, something like that. Later on, he said Kalendar basically hadn’t given him the time of day since he moved onto the block, but what he did proved that blacks and whites could get along fine, at least in the city of Millhaven. That bilge was exactly what people wanted to hear. Especially then, one year after the big riots—Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. People lapped it up, turned Kalendar into a symbol.” He smiled. “Of course, Kalendar had no time at all for black people.”

“What did he do, rescue the children?”

“Both of them. The parents weren’t even out of bed when he hit the door. Wasn’t for Kalendar, everybody would have died of smoke inhalation. According to the bus driver, he smashed down the door and bulled straight in. He’s shouting, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’ The kids more or less run into him, or he runs into them. He grabs them and hightails it out the door.”

“Were the parents still in bed?”

“Standing right in front of the door, trying to figure out what to do next. Dazed and groggy and all that, but I hardly think the bus driver was Mensa material anyhow. Kalendar ran back in and slammed into him and his wife and shoved everyone outside.”

“So he saved them all.”

“You could see it that way. Kalendar didn’t want to stop there, either.”

“He thought more people were still inside?”

“The bus driver told the reporter that Kalendar was fighting to go back in when the police and the firemen showed up and restrained him. All this came out all over again when he got arrested, that’s the reason I remember it.”

Tim turned left onto the pretty street called An Die Blumen, making his way toward the lake. Barely pretending to look for Mark, Philip let his eyes drift over a little knot of teenage boys and girls walking east, carrying tennis rackets and soft Adidas and Puma bags. They had the bland confident good looks produced by wealthy parents, private schools, and a sense of entitlement.

“I wish I could afford to live around here,” Philip said. “Instead of that dopey Jimbo Monaghan, Mark could have friends like those kids. Look at them—they’re completely safe. They’re going to go through life laughing and carrying tennis rackets. And do you know why? Because this is a long way from Pigtown.”

Tom Pasmore had grown up around the corner from where they were, and his childhood, Tim knew, had been neither safe nor stable. He turned onto Eastern Shore Drive, and Philip swiveled his head to look at the great mansions. In one of them, a man had murdered his wife’s lover; in another, a millionaire given to black suits and Cuban cigars had raped his two-year-old daughter; in another, two off-duty policemen acting as paid executioners had murdered a kind and brilliant man.

“Jimbo wasn’t good for Mark,” Philip continued.

“You’re kidding me.”

“Believe me, I know kids, and those two were not in the mainstream. To be honest, they were a couple of losers. And if you ask me, they were getting way too close. You could see it in the music they liked. They didn’t listen to normal people. All that airy-fairy stuff gave me the creeps.”

12

On the night Mark first broke into the abandoned house, the lost girl, who was the girl she had declined to rescue, came again to Nancy Underhill. Her son had left for the evening, and Philip had vanished into his “den,” where he would remain until 10:00 P.M., at which time he would emerge, announce that he was going to bed, and look at her as if any deviation from his schedule was an indication of questionable thought processes. At 10:30 on the dot, he would sit bolt upright in bed and listen for the sound of Mark either opening the front door or walking from the backyard into the kitchen. If he failed to hear Mark return before his curfew, he would instruct her to “work out” a suitable punishment for “your son,” then lie back, roll over, and, having fulfilled his duties as CEO of the Superior Street Underhills, return untroubled to sleep.

She had been seated on the davenport with her legs beneath her and a cold cup of coffee before her on the table, staring at, but not seeing, a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond. Everybody Loves Raymond was camouflage. Philip detested the program and was unlikely to investigate her state of mind if he found her watching it.

Instead of a scene in which an actor named Ray Romano was pretending to argue with his father, Nancy was looking at something else entirely, a scene that replayed itself across the screen of her inner eye. Nancy’s scene took place not in a fictional Long Island living room, but in the kitchen of a quick-and-dirty tract house constructed by a shady contractor named James Carrollton, then in the second year of a three-year stretch for tax evasion. Standing in for Ray Barone, sportswriter and father of three, was Nancy Underhill, a suburban housewife, still childless after two years of marriage; and before Nancy was Myra Kalendar, the wife of her terrible cousin Joseph, who in adolescence had spirited the neighbors’ dogs and cats away to distant lots, doused them with lighter fuel, and set them on fire. Joseph had referred to this activity as “making torches.”

Myra sat across the table in the tacky suburban kitchen and begged for help. Myra had no friends. She could talk to no one but Nancy. Joseph would kill her if she went to the police. She begged not for herself, but for the daughter who since birth had been Joseph Kalendar’s private project and plaything. In the year of the appeal, Lily Kalendar was six years old and a secret from both the state and the school board. Until this moment, she had been a secret from Nancy, too. Joseph took his daughter out of the house only at night, to conceal her from the neighbors. The one time Lily had managed to go outside during the day—to escape!—she had hidden in the alley, and her father had gone crazy with rage and worry. When he smelled smoke, he saw that it came from the house of a black neighbor with two daughters Lily had often seen playing in their yard; he assumed that his daughter had fled there. On his return, coughing and red-eyed and reeking of smoke, Lily had crawled weeping out of hiding, begging for mercy.

Instead, Myra said, she got the beating of her life. Her father loved her, she was the love of his life, and her disobedience would cost her dearly. And after that, Joseph had built a special room to hold his beloved daughter and a special wall to hide the room. But that was only two of many modifications Joseph had made to their house.

The worst was . . . she did not want to say it.

The scene played and replayed in Nancy’s mind and memory as she stared blindly at the television set. Myra sobbing, she herself trembling and lowering her head, thinking, Philip is right, she’s unbalanced. None of this is true, she’s making it up. Nancy knew what she had done; she had backed away. She had said to herself, Myra had a miscarriage, we all knew that. There isn’t any daughter, thank goodness. They’re both crazy. Fear of her dreadful cousin had led her to betray her niece. Eight years later, the headlines had shown the world what her cousin was capable of, but Nancy could not lie to herself: she had already known.

Mark surprised her by coming home early. After giving her one of those looks that had become familiar to her, Mark muttered something about being tired and disappeared into his room. At 10:00 P.M., as if summoned by one of Quincy’s timetable bells, Philip popped into the living room and announced that bedtime had come. Alone, then, she sat in the living room until the next program had chattered to a conclusion. Nancy turned off the television and in the abrupt silence understood that her worst fear had been realized. The world would no longer run along its old, safe tracks. There had been a rip in the fabric, and bleak, terrible miracles would result. That was how it came to her, a tear in the fabric of daily life, through which monstrosities could pour. And enter they had, drawn by Nancy’s old, old crime.

For she knew her son had not obeyed her. In one way or another, Mark had awakened the Kalendars. Now they all had to live with the consequences, which would be unbearable but otherwise impossible to predict. A giant worm was loose, devouring reality in great mouthfuls. Now the worm’s sensors had located Nancy, and its great, humid body oozed ever closer, so close she could feel the earth yield beneath it.

Nancy’s own sensors prickled with dread. Moments before she was able to raise her eyes and look at the arch into the little dining room, she knew her visitor had returned. There she stood, the child, a six-year-old girl in dirty overalls, her bare, filthy feet on the outermost edge of the faded rag rug, her small, slim, baleful back turned to Nancy. Her hair was matted with grease, possibly with blood. Anger boiled from her and hung in the dead air between them. There was a good measure of contempt in all that rage. Lily had come through the rip in the fabric to cast judgment on her weak traitorous aunt, that fearful and despairing wretch. Oh the fury oh the rage in a tortured child, oh the power in that fury. She had come also for Mark, his mother saw. Mark was half hers already, and had been from the moment Joseph Kalendar’s hellhouse had surged out of the mist and knocked him off his stupid skateboard.

13

It amazed Jimbo Monaghan how dumb smart people could be. If he understood the reason for most of what Mark had said and done over the past five days, it could not be all that difficult for anyone to grasp. Especially when the reason was so obvious. Mark had come home in the afternoon, strolled into the little downstairs bathroom to take a leak, and in a tub full of tepid, bloody water, discovered the naked corpse of his mother with a plastic bag over her head. The film of condensation on the inside of the bag kept him from making out her face. Mainly, he could see her nose and the black, open hole of her mouth. A second later, he noticed the paring knife dripping blood onto the tiles beside the tub. At first I thought it was some kind of horrible mistake, he told Jimbo. Then I thought if I went out into the kitchen and came back in, she wouldn’t be there anymore.

All that time, his heart seemed not to beat. He thought he had hung in the doorway for an incredibly long time, looking at his mother and trying to make sense of what he saw. Blood pounded in his ears. He moved a step forward, and the tops of her knees came into view, floating like little pale islands in the red water.

In the next moment, he found himself standing alone in the middle of the kitchen, as if blown backward by a great wind. Through the open bathroom door, he could see one of his mother’s arms propped on the side of the tub. He told Jimbo, “I went over to the wall phone. It felt like I was swimming underwater. I didn’t even know who I was going to call, but I guess I dialed my father’s number at Quincy. He told me to call 911 and wait for him outside.”

Mark did exactly that. He called 911, communicated the essential information, and went outside to wait. About five minutes later, his father and the paramedics arrived more or less simultaneously. While he stood on the porch, he felt a numb, suspended clarity that, he thought, must be similar to what ghosts and dead people experienced, watching the living go through their paces.

In Jimbo’s opinion, that was the last time Mark had been clear about his own emotions. The next day, he had turned up at Jimbo’s back door, his mind focused on an unalterable plan. It was as if he had been considering it for weeks. He wanted to break into the house on Michigan Street, and his friend Jimbo had to come with him. In fact, Jimbo was indispensable. He couldn’t do it without him.

He confessed that he had tried to do it by himself and run into some unexpected trouble. His body had gone bananas on him. He’d felt like he couldn’t breathe and it was hard to see. All those spider webs, yuck! But none of that would happen if Jimbo went with him, Mark said, he knew they would be able to pass untroubled into the house. And once they got inside, they would be able to check out the strangest part of that building, which Mark had not mentioned to his friend until this very moment, the pup-tent room. Wasn’t Jimbo curious about a room like that? Wouldn’t he like to get a look at it?

“Not if that guy is in there,” Jimbo said.

“Think back, Jimbo. Are you really sure you saw him? Or did I maybe put the idea in your head?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Mark said. “Because if it’s the two of us, we’ll be all right.”

“I don’t get you.”

“You watch my back, I watch yours,” Mark said. “I think that house doesn’t have anything in it but atmosphere, anyhow.”

“Atmosphere,” Jimbo said. “Now I really don’t get you.”

“Atmosphere makes you see stuff. It made you faint, and it made me feel sick—it felt like spider webs were all over me. But they weren’t real spider webs, they were atmosphere.”

“Okay,” Jimbo said. “Maybe I see that, a little bit. But why do you want to go in there again?”

“I have to go in there,” Mark said. “That house killed my mother.”

Silently, Jimbo uttered, Ooh-kayyy, startled by an understanding that had come to him as if by angelic messenger: Mark felt guilty, and he didn’t know it. Jimbo did not have a detailed grasp of his friend’s psyche, but he was absolutely certain that Mark would not be ranting in this way if, on the day after he broke his promise to his mother, he had not walked into a bathroom and found her lying dead in the tub. Of that, he would not speak. It was unspeakable by definition. Instead, he could not stop himself from talking about this screwy plan. Jimbo resolved not to give in, to fight Mark on this issue for as long as it took.

Over the following days, Mark tested his resolution so often that Jimbo thought that he had been invited to accompany Mark into the house on Michigan Street on the order of something like once an hour. After the first dozen times, he adopted the approach that he would use on every occasion thereafter, to pretend that Mark’s obsessiveness was a joke. Mark might easily have been enraged by this tactic, but he barely noticed it.

One day during that hideous week, Jimbo heard from his father, who had learned of it from an off-duty police officer in a cop bar called the House of Ko-Reck-Shun, that a Los Angeles film crew would be on Jefferson Street early that afternoon, shooting a scene for a gangster movie. He called Mark, and the boys decided to take a bus downtown, an area they did not know as well as they imagined. They knew the number 14 bus would take them past the main library and the county museum, and they assumed that from there they would easily find Jefferson Street in or near the section of downtown located west of the Millhaven River, where theaters, bookstores, specialty shops, and department stores lined Grand Avenue all the way to Lafayette University, west of the library and museum.

They got off the bus too early and wasted twenty minutes wandering north and east before asking directions of a preppy-looking guy who appeared, Jimbo thought, more than a touch too interested in Mark, although as usual Mark failed to notice that he was being admired. Then they walked an extra block up Orson Street and reached the top of Cathedral Square before looking back to the corner and noticing that they had already gone past Jefferson. To cut off some extra distance, they took one of the paths angling through the square. With a pang, Jimbo realized that earlier in the summer they would never have made such a journey without their skateboards; this time, they had never considered bringing the boards along.

“We have to go in there,” Mark said. “You know it. You’re softening up. Little by little, my logic is wearing away your resistance.”

They reached the bottom of Cathedral Square and turned left on Jefferson. Two blocks ahead, a lot of people were milling around alongside the Pforzheimer Hotel.

Mark jumped ahead and turned around, dancing on the balls of his feet. “Don’t you believe in my stunning logic?” He aimed a fist at Jimbo’s left arm and gave him two light blows.

“All right, let’s think about it, okay? There’s this empty house, except it might not actually be empty.”

“It’s empty,” Mark said.

“Be quiet. There’s this house, okay? For a long time you don’t really see it, but when you finally do, you want to spend most of your time looking at it. Then your mother makes you promise to leave the place alone. You get spooked out, but you decide to break in anyhow and look around. And the next day, you find out she killed herself. And then you lose your mind, you say the house made it happen, and you have to go in and search the place from top to bottom.”

“Sounds logical to me.”

“You know what it sounds like to me?”

“Ah, a great idea?”

“Guilt.”

Mark stared at him, momentarily speechless.

“It is guilt, pure guilt. You can’t stand it. You’re blaming yourself.”

Mark glanced around at the streetlamps, the parked cars, the placards before the buildings on Jefferson Street. He looked almost dazed.

“I swear, no one understands me. Not my father, not even you. My uncle might understand me—he has an imagination. He’s coming here today. Maybe he’s already in town.”

Mark pointed at the Pforzheimer, unaware that I was looking down at him from a fourth-floor window. “That’s where he’s staying, the Pforzheimer. It costs a lot to stay there. For a writer, he makes a lot of money.”

(This was sweet, but not very accurate.)

“Maybe we should go see him right now,” Mark said. “Wanna do it?”

Jimbo declined. An unpredictable adult stranger from New York could only complicate matters. The two boys continued up the street until they were within about twenty feet of the film crew. A burly man with a ZZ Top beard and a name tag on a string around his neck waved them to a halt.

“It’s that dude from Family Ties, ” Jimbo said.

“Michael J. Fox? You’re crazy. Michael J. Fox isn’t that old.”

“Not him, the dude who played his father.”

“He must be really old by now. He still looks pretty good, though.”

“No matter how good he looks, that car’s going to mess him up,” Mark said, and both boys laughed.

Mark’s father spoiled everything, that was the problem. They had seen Timothy Underhill’s car pull up in front of the house, and Jimbo could tell that his friend was excited just to see his uncle walk up to the porch. Jimbo thought he looked like an okay kind of guy, kind of big, and comfortable in jeans and a blue blazer. He had a been-around kind of face that made him look easy to get along with.

But when they turned off the boom box and went out of the room, Mark’s dad made a dumb, dismissive remark even before they got to the staircase—something about “the son and heir” and his “el sidekick-o faithful-o,” making them both sound like fools. When they were being introduced, Mark’s dad referred to Jimbo as Mark’s “best buddy-roo” and insisted on treating them as if they were in the second grade, which made it impossible to stay in the house. Then Mark’s dad got all anal about what time they had to be back, and Jimbo could see Mark getting jumpier and jumpier. He looked like a guy who had just put down a ticking suitcase and wanted to get the hell out of there before it blew up.

Once they managed to get out, Jimbo followed Mark reluctantly to the sidewalk in front of 3323, where no shadowy nonfigures had not-appeared in the living room window. Jimbo had to agree: whatever might have been true earlier, now the house was as empty as a blown egg. You could tell just by looking at it. The only movement in that place came from the settling of the dust.

“We are going to do this,” Mark said. “Believe it or not, we are.”

“Do you want me to come along to the thing at the funeral home tonight?”

“If you’re not going, I’m not going, and I have to go, so . . .”

“I guess I am el faithful-o sidekick-o,” Jimbo said.

Alone and massive on its little hill, Trott Brothers struck Jimbo as looking like a castle with dungeons and suits of armor. Inside, it was both grand and a little seedy. They were pointed to a small, tired-looking room like a chapel, with four rows of chairs facing an open coffin. To Jimbo, this was terrible, cruel, tasteless: they were forcing Mark to look at his dead mother’s face! It was one thing to respect the dead, but how about respecting the living? Jimbo risked a peek at the pale figure in the coffin. The person lying there did not look like Mark’s mother, exactly; she looked more like a younger sister of Mrs. Underhill’s, someone who’d gone off and known a completely different life. Immediately, the men drifted to the back of the little room, and Jimbo and Mark sat down in the last row.

Mark’s father handed him a card with a Hawaiian sunset on one side. When he turned it over, Jimbo saw the Lord’s Prayer printed beneath Nancy’s name and her dates.

“You okay?” he whispered to Mark, who was turning the card over and over in his hands, examining it as if it were a clue to a murder in a mystery novel.

Mark nodded.

A couple of minutes later, he leaned over and whispered, “Do you think we could sneak out?”

Jimbo shook his head.

Philip ordered his son to get on his feet and pay his respects to his mother. Mark stood up and walked the length of the center aisle until he was in front of the coffin. As Jimbo watched, Philip staged a dramatic moment and put his arm around his son’s shoulders, probably the first time he had done that since Mark’s tenth birthday. He couldn’t help it, Jimbo thought. In fact, he didn’t even know that he was putting on a photo op for a nonexistent photographer. He thought he was being genuine. Jimbo could see Mark squirm beneath his father’s touch.

As soon as Philip relented and walked away, Jimbo got to his feet and moved up to join his friend. He did not want to look at that cosmeticized not-Nancy in the coffin, so he moved slowly, but he could not bear the thought of Mark standing up there by himself. When he reached Mark’s side, he glanced in his direction and saw by a softening in his eyes that Mark was grateful for his presence.

In a voice almost too low to be heard, Mark said, “How long do you think I’m supposed to stand here?”

“You could leave now,” Jimbo said.

Mark stared down at the woman in the coffin. His face had settled into an expressionless mask. A single tear leaked from the corner of his left eye, then his right. Startled, Jimbo glanced again at his friend and saw that the mask of his face had begun to tremble. More tears were brimming in his eyes. All at once, Jimbo felt like crying, too.

From the back of the room, Mark’s father said in a pompous stage whisper, “You have to feel sorry for the poor kid,” and Jimbo’s tears dried before they were shed. If he’d heard it, so had Mark.

The boys’ eyes met. Mark’s face had turned violently red. Timothy Underhill said something too soft to be heard, and this time all but forgetting to keep his voice down, Mark’s father said, “Mark found her that afternoon—came home from God knows where . . .”

Jimbo heard Mark gasp.

“By the time I got home,” Philip was saying, “they were taking her to the ambulance.”

“Oh, no,” said Mark’s uncle.

His face rigid but still flushed, Mark stepped back from the coffin and turned around. A few minutes later, all of them were moving back outside into the roaring heat. The huge sun hung too close to the earth, and the light burned Jimbo’s eyes. Mark’s father buttoned his suit jacket, straightened his tie, and set off down the hill like a salesman off to close a deal. Timothy Underhill gave the boys a look brimming with sympathy, then followed his brother down the descending path. Lines of heat wavered up from the roof of the Volvo.

Mark jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and glared at the neat, suspiciously lush grass that ended in a knife edge at the sides of the path. “I hate my father,” he said in an eerily reasonable voice.

With a brief, electric thrill of panic, Jimbo wondered how Mark was going to get through the funeral.

14

For Mark, the day of his mother’s funeral revolved around the moment the hard, grayish-brown lump of clay bearing the print of the gravedigger’s shovel fell from his right hand into the maw of her grave and struck the top of her coffin. Before that moment, he had wondered if he could make it through everything the day would demand of him, or if he might succumb to various disasters either internal or external in nature. He could see himself fainting, as Jimbo had fainted on the lawn of the house on Michigan Street; far worse, he could also see himself falling down in a frothing, eye-rolling seizure. These humiliations would occur, he thought, in front of the mourners assembled at Sunnyside Cemetery. The minister would be opening his great Bible; the Monaghans, and the Shillingtons, and the Tafts, plus a couple of the goofy ladies from the gas company and maybe a schoolteacher or two would be standing beside the grave, looking sad and dignified; even Jackie Monaghan, who would surely be in a most grievous condition of hangover and therefore in desperate need of a quick, medicinal jolt; and Mark’s father would be staring straight ahead, with his hands folded on the mound of his belly in a fury of enraged impatience; and then he would embarrass everyone and disgrace himself by jerking and twitching and drooling into the cemetery’s beautifully maintained grass. Or the sky would suddenly darken, abrupt rain would slash down onto the mourners, and a bolt of lightning would slide out of the firmament and fry him where he stood.

The internal catastrophes were far worse, involving as they did a painful death caused by the overheated, untrustworthy physical mechanism that was his body. Because these were worse, they were far more likely. A heart attack, an aneurysm, a brain hemorrhage—common sense told him that he was much likelier to die from a brain hemorrhage than a lightning bolt.

His father’s face suggested that he was counting the minutes until he could leave. Mark regarded the stiff, damped-down expression and realized that he was bound to this man for years and years to come.

Standing a bit apart from the rest of the group and wearing a dark blue suit, horn-rimmed sunglasses of an odd, solarized blue, and a dark blue WBGO cap bearing the image of a man playing a tenor saxophone, Uncle Tim looked as though he was checking everybody out. Maybe Mark’s father would let him stay with Uncle Tim for a week or two.

He listened to the Rent-a-minister’s words, thinking that he seemed like a nice man. He had a slow, pleasant way of speaking, and the sort of rumbling, trustworthy voice that paid off for politicians and voice-over men. Every word the man said seemed to be sensible and carefully chosen. Mark understood each one as it entered his consciousness. The larger verbal units of phrases and sentences, however, made so little sense to Mark that they might as well have been in a foreign language—Basque, maybe, or Atlantean. He was hyperconscious of the breath moving in and out of his throat, the blood traveling through his veins, the sizzle of sunlight on the backs of his hands.

The minister stepped back. A machine like a forklift lowered the coffin into the Astroturf-bedecked grave. The coffin settled on the ground, and two men whisked away the fake grass. Mark’s father walked the few steps to the pyramidal heap of earth scooped from the gravesite. He picked up a baseball-sized lump of dirt, leaned over the open grave, and extended his arm. The lump of dirt fell from his hand and struck the lid of the coffin with a reverberant thunk that made Mark fear he would be struck deaf and blind. For a second, the world before him faded into hundreds of fast-moving red and white specks like infant comets. The dancing specks resolved into the figure of Philip Underhill wiping his hands as he stepped back from the grave. Mark’s head was spinning and the middle of his chest seemed to be filled with effervescent air slightly cooler than the rest of his body. Uncle Tim moved toward the grave. He, too, held a baseball of earth in one hand.

Uncle Tim’s rock hit the coffin with the flat, hollow rap of a hand on a massive wooden door.

Still a little disembodied, Mark moved over to the temporary pyramid of grave dirt and pulled from it a lump with long striations on its widest surface. This piece of clay had been through the mill. It had been stabbed in the gut, bitten, and cut in half. The cool gas filling his chest advanced into the bottom of his throat. His feet moved with surprising confidence alongside the deep trench in the ground. He let the hard-edged clod drop from his hand, and it struck the coffin with a high-pitched pinging sound that reminded Mark uncomfortably of a doorbell. A shiver passed through him.

No matter what Jimbo said, Mark suddenly understood that he had seen the force that had stopped him inside the back door of the house; he had seen the force that had killed his mother. It had been standing at the top of Michigan Street with its back turned to him. Mark remembered the dark, tangled hair, the wide back, the black coat hanging like iron, and the sense of utter wrongness that had flowed out from this figure. That wrongness had seeped into his mother and so poisoned her that she had leaped into her grave.

The day swung around on a pivot, and his fear transformed itself into clarity. Two tasks lay before him. He had to learn whatever he could about the history of 3323 North Michigan Street and those who had lived in it, so that he could put a name to that evil being. And he had, more than ever, to discover its secrets. He could avenge his mother’s death in no other way. Images of himself ransacking the closets and ripping up floorboards raced through his mind. According to Jimbo, guilt lay behind these desires, but Jimbo was wrong. What he was feeling was rage.

Like a set of orders, his new clarity accompanied him on the journey back to Superior Street and sent him into the house with the white noise of his purpose humming in his head. The funeral was over, it was time to arrange the next step, hurry hurry the minutes slip away.

Men and women filtered in through the front door, but Jimbo was not among them. Mark’s father and Uncle Tim set out the soft drinks and the casseroles and coffee cake brought by the Shillingtons and the Tafts, and soon a crowd as numerous as flies around a bloody corpse had fastened on the dining room table, fracturing and coalescing again as they wandered in and out of the living room holding paper plates and paper cups. The Rochenkos came in hand in hand because they felt shy and ill at ease. A few beats later, Old Man Hillyard eased through the door, not holding hands with anyone, in fact gripping a cane with one hand while the other was deep in a trouser pocket. Annoyingly, Mr. Hillyard caught Mark’s eye and came limping toward him. On a ninety-degree day, he was wearing a thick plaid shirt, ancient corduroy trousers held up by suspenders, and an incongruous pair of cowboy boots.

“I was very sorry to hear about your mother,” he said. “You have my condolences, son. If there’s anything I can ever do for you, just ask.”

Like that’s gonna happen,Mark thought, and thanked the old man.

“See you and the Monaghan boy out on your skateboards almost every day,” Hillyard said. “Those wheels of yours sure make a hellacious racket.” His face drew itself up into a network of deep corrugations, and Mark realized that he was smiling. “Looks like you might be improving some. Wish I could get around like the two of you.” He lifted the cane and shook it. “I was doing all right until my ankle folded right under me when I stepped off my porch the other day. Went down like a sack of potatoes. The way I feel now, I can barely make it to the grocery store.” He leaned forward and whispered, “Tell you the truth, son, I can barely make it to the can when I have to go wee-wee in the middle of the night.”

“I can’t help you with that one,” Mark said, wanting desperately to get away from the old man.

“You and Red spend a heck of a lot of time staring at that empty house across from me,” Old Man Hillyard said, horrifying him. “The two of you thinking of moving in?”

“Sorry, my dad needs me to do something,” Mark blurted, then backpedaled on an angle that gave him a better view of the front door. His father’s boss, Mr. Battley, had just appeared at the head of a phalanx of people from the school, all of whom he knew far too well. In their professional costumes of gray suits and white shirts, they resembled FBI agents, but poorly paid ones.

Never before had the house contained so many people. The crowd spilled from the living room into the dining room, where the Quincy people were now single-mindedly headed, and from there into the kitchen. Although most people were speaking quietly, their voices created a noisy Babel in which it was difficult to make out individual words. Ordinarily, this would have resulted in furious eruptions from his father, but Philip seemed more relaxed and at ease than at any time earlier in the day. He looked like a host who had decided to let the party take care of itself. Now his father was following Mr. Battley toward the food, and Mark suspected that he would stay by his boss’s side until the principal had scarfed down enough free grub and made his good-byes.

When Mark glanced again at the front of the living room, Mr. Hillyard was boring the pants off the Rochenkos. The Monaghan family was beginning to come through the door. First Margo, as ever suggesting that some movie star had happened to walk in by mistake; then Jackie, grinning and red-faced, as ever suggesting that he wouldn’t at all object were you to offer him a wee dram of popskull; and finally Jimbo, who gave him a not-unfriendly glance of inspection.

Before he could signal Jimbo to meet him in the kitchen, his uncle Tim appeared beside him with an unexpected offer. “I think you should come to New York and stay with me for a week or so. Maybe in August?”

Pleased and surprised, Mark said he would love to do that and asked if Tim had mentioned the visit to his father.

“I will later,” Tim said. He smiled at Mark before cutting through the crowd in search of Philip.

For the next ten minutes, he lost sight of Jimbo as neighbors and coworkers patted his cheek or gripped his upper arm and uttered, over and over again, always with the sense of communicating a great truth, the same useless and depressing remarks. Must be awfully tough on you, son. . . . She’s in a better place now. . . . God has a reason for everything, you know. . . . Gee, I remember when my mom died.

Finally, he spotted Jimbo eyeing him from just inside the dining room arch and went over to talk to him.

“Are you okay?” Jimbo asked.

“More than you’d think.”

Their fathers stood, conversing quietly, only a few feet away, their backs turned toward the boys. On the other side of their fathers, Mr. Battley was flapping his gums at Uncle Tim.

“Good,” Jimbo said. “You know . . .” Jimbo’s wide mouth turned down at the edges, and his eyes shrank into a look of pure anguish. “Yo, I’m really sorry about your mom. I should have told you that right away, but I didn’t know how.”

Without warning, emotion surged up within Mark, searing everything it touched. For a couple of seconds, an abyss of feeling opened before him, and the sheer weight of the air on his shoulders threatened to push him in. Tears blinded him. He brought a hand up to his eyes; he exhaled and heard himself make a strangled, inarticulate sound of grief.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

Jimbo’s voice rescued him.

“I guess,” he said, and wiped his eyes. His body was still reverberating with emotion.

Behind him, Jackie Monaghan said, “Wasn’t Nancy related to this weird guy who used to live around here? Somebody said something about it once, I don’t remember who.”

His father said, “Should have kept his mouth shut, whoever he was.”

“I sort of lost it for a second there,” Mark said, wondering what Jimbo’s dad was talking about. Now Jackie was saying that his mother’s relative had risked his life to save some children. Mark turned his head just in time to see Jackie tell his father that the kids were black. That would be that, he thought; the conversation would get ugly in a hurry.

“Well, it’s no wonder,” said Jimbo.

“No, it’s not the funeral,” Mark said. “I just understood something I should have seen before. Actually, I don’t know how I missed it.”

“What?” Jimbo asked.

Mark moved closer to Jimbo and whispered, “It was the house.”

“What do you mean, ‘the house’?” Comprehension flashed into his eyes. “Oh, no. No, man. Come on.”

“It’s the truth. You didn’t hear her chew me out for even thinking about that place. Ask yourself—why would she kill herself?”

“I don’t know why,” Jimbo said, miserably.

“Right. I didn’t stay far enough away, and something in there killed her. That’s what happened, Jimbo. We can’t dick around about this anymore. We have to go in there.”

In the silence of Jimbo’s inability to respond, both boys clearly heard Philip Underhill say, “I should have known better than to marry into a bunch of screwballs like that.”

Mark turned pale. Unnoticed by Philip and Jackie, he moved past them and dodged through the crowd gathered around the table. Jimbo hastened after his friend and caught up with him at the opening into the kitchen, where, surprisingly, Mark had come to a sudden halt.

When Jimbo reached Mark’s side, he was struck by the expression on his face. His mouth hung slightly open, and the side of his face visible to Jimbo had gone white. But for a small blue vein beating just above the V of hair at his temple, he might have been carved from marble.

Jimbo did not dare to look into the kitchen. After having glimpsed that being through his father’s field glasses, the last thing he wanted to do was to see it in Mark Underhill’s kitchen. The thought of that formidable presence standing before him sent fear washing through his stomach.

He had no idea how long he stood beside Mark Underhill, too afraid of what he might see to turn his head. Mark did not move; as far as Jimbo could tell, Mark did not even take a breath. To Jimbo, they seemed to stand, he immobilized by Mark’s immobility, for an eternity. Around them, the world, too, had become immobile; yet the blue vein in Mark’s temple beat, beat, beat. Jimbo’s tongue felt clumsy and enormous in his dry mouth.

Awareness of his own cowardice forced him to turn his head and face what had trespassed into Mark’s kitchen. Half the oxygen seemed to leave the space immediately around him, and the light faded as if a subtle rheostat had been more breathed upon than dialed. A faint odor of excrement and corruption, as of a corpse rotting in the distance, tainted the air.

A sound like buzzing, like insects, filtered in through the screen door.

But what he saw after he had turned his head was only Mr. Shillington leaning against the sink next to Mrs. Taft, who seemed depressed by what her neighbor was saying. When both of them stopped their conversation to stare at the boys, Jimbo saw annoyance in Mr. Shillington’s eyes, the shine of tears in Mrs. Taft’s. Two thoughts occurred to him at virtually the same moment: Mr. Shillington and Mrs. Taft were having an affair, and he just dumped her and For a second or two, time just stopped, so those seconds never happened.

At the center of his being, Jimbo felt as though some great machine had paused its workings, come to rest, then ponderously swung back into motion.

Beside him, Mark was saying, “His back is always turned.” The words reached Jimbo as if through the process of translation from a foreign language. When he had at last absorbed their meaning, he understood Mark’s sentence no better. The only man in the kitchen was Mr. Shillington, who was pretending to be happy that two teenage boys were staring at him.

“Something in Linda’s eye,” he said, and smiled. “Mrs. Taft has something in her eye, and I was trying to get it out.”

“Who?” Jimbo whispered to Mark.

“You didn’t see him?” Mark turned upon him in amazed disbelief.

“No, but something happened,” Jimbo said.

“Now, kid,” said Mr. Shillington. “Don’t go getting the wrong idea about this.” His long, bony face was undergoing an interesting color shift. Below the cheekbones, he was turning a blotchy red, but from the eyes up, he went white.

“Something happened, all right,” Mark said.

“No, it did not, ” insisted Mr. Shillington. Linda Taft shrank into herself, wrinkling her nose and glancing around.

“Sorry,” Mark said. “I’m not talking to you.” He looked back at Jimbo. “You really didn’t see him standing between them and the door, with his back turned?”

Jimbo shook his head.

“There was no one in this room but the two of us, Mark, until you and your friend barged in.”

“Well, we’re going to barge out now, so you can go back to your eye surgery,” Mark said. “Come on, Jimbo.”

Their eyes as large and innocent as those of sheep, Linda Taft and Ted Shillington watched Mark drag Jimbo across the room. When he reached the door, Mark pushed it open and shoved Jimbo out into the backyard. The door slammed behind them.

Faintly, Jimbo heard Linda Taft say, “Did you just smell something funny?”

In the world’s loudest whisper, Mark said, “He—was—there. Standing next to the door. Facing the wall, so all I could see was his back.”

“Yo, I felt something,” Jimbo said, still feeling as though he were mostly asleep.

“Tell me. Tell me, Jimbo. I have to know.”

“Something terrible. It was like it was hard to breathe for a while. It sort of got dark, and Mrs. Taft was right, I smelled something nasty.”

Mark was nodding his head. His eyes seemed to have retreated far back in his skull, and his mouth was a tight line. “Damn. I wish you could have seen him, too.”

Jimbo offered his friend the thought that had spoken itself in his mind. “They would have seen him, too. Mr. Shillington and Mrs. Taft.”

“I doubt that,” Mark said. A faint smile touched his mouth, then faded. “But it would have been pretty interesting if they did see him.” He considered that possibility. “I guess I’m glad they didn’t.”

“I’m glad I didn’t,” Jimbo said.

“He doesn’t want you to see him.”

“Who is he?” Jimbo’s question came out in a small, strange wail.

“He must be the guy who used to live in that house.” Mark gripped Jimbo’s upper arms and for a wild second shook him like a rag doll. His eyes looked enormous and much darker than usual. “It’s obvious. And he’s the reason my mother’s dead. You know what that means?”

Jimbo knew, but decided to keep his mouth shut.

“It means you and I are for sure going to find out who the son of a bitch was. I want to look at his face. That’s what it means. And there won’t be any more argument about this, Jimbo.”

Jimbo realized that Mark had him, he was hooked. He was accepting the most outrageous aspect of Mark’s theory. He had bought into his friend’s crazy theory the moment he’d accepted what Mark told him he had seen in his kitchen. Once you take someone’s word about an invisible man, you are playing with his racquet on his court, and it is no use pretending otherwise.

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“I don’t think anything is going to happen to us if we go in there during the daytime.”

“Even if he is there, I guess I wouldn’t be able to see him, anyhow.” He had it in him to giggle, however nervously. “If I said, Fuck you, you’d do it by yourself, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would.”

Jimbo sighed as if from the soles of his feet. “So when are we going to do this thing I said I was never going to do?”

“Tomorrow morning,” Mark said. “I want us to have plenty of time.”

What do people in Millhaven do at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings in June? Most residents of Millhaven who attend church services are already back home, changed out of the shirts and pants they wore to St. Robert’s or Mount Zion—almost nobody in Millhaven wears a jacket and tie to church anymore—into T-shirts and shorts, and they’re already mowing their lawns or working at the tool bench. Some people are driving across town to see their mother, their brother, or their aunts and uncles. A lot of women are planning meals for the relatives who will show up in a couple of hours, ready for lunch. A lot of men are thinking about piling up the briquettes in the barbecue and wondering if they should drive to the store for some nice juicy pork ribs. A number of people are watching Charles Osgood on CBS’s Sunday Morning, and a good third of those are still in bed. Hundreds of men and women are dividing their time between reading Sunday’s Ledger and eating breakfast. Hundreds of others are still asleep, and a few of those, the ones with pasty complexions and foul breath, will wake up hungover. Joggers jog in the parks and along the sides of the roads; shopkeepers open up their shops; young couples awaken beneath rumpled sheets and embrace in shafts of sunlight.

In the Sherman Park area, formerly Pigtown, chambermaids change sheets at the venerable St. Alwyn Hotel. Golfers pilot their carts, as happily as is possible for golfers, down the fairways at the Millhaven Country Club, where the groundskeepers are eyeing the greens. Hardy children thrash around in the big public swimming pools in Hoyt and Pulaski parks, where, at sixty-eight degrees, the water is still a little too cold for most people, no matter how young they are. Pop once took us all the way to Hoyt Park on a morning in June, and the cold water turned Philip’s lips cobalt blue.

On Superior Street, the only person left asleep is Jackie Monaghan, who will not slip groaning into a painful wakefulness for another two hours. Margo Monaghan is sliding a tray of cinnamon buns into the oven. In 3324, Philip Underhill sits on the threadbare, sagging green davenport and, ostensibly splitting his attention between the newspaper spread open on his lap and a strutting, roaring evangelist on TV, wonders about the identity of this Sherman Park Killer guy and how many kids he will cause to disappear before being locked up. On either side of brooding Philip, a brittle tranquillity pervades the Taft and Shillington residences. Ted Shillington is standing outside in his backyard, smoking, only half aware that his wife is glaring at him from the window above the kitchen sink. Putting away the breakfast dishes in an identical kitchen two houses south, Linda Taft shocks herself by hoping that Mr. Hank Taft might fall down dead of a heart attack before he comes in to ask her what’s for lunch.

In his abstracted and melancholy state, Ted Shillington barely registers the firehouse hair and loping gait of Jimbo Monaghan, who glides across his field of vision without saying a word. When Jimbo passes between the ugly eight-foot wall and the Underhills’ collapsed fence, Ted registers it not at all, nor the figure of Mark Underhill silently stepping over the fence to join his friend. The boys move quickly southward down the alley to Townsend Street, entirely unobserved by Ted Shillington, who has become aware that someone is watching him with a quality—to judge by the sensation at the back of his neck—akin to hostility. Unaware of the banality of this desire, he considers how marvelous it would be were his wife, Laura Shillington, and Linda’s husband, Hank Taft, to have inaugurated a secret passion so great that the two of them would flee Superior Street hand in hand. That could happen, he and she together, couldn’t it? Why should a solution so satisfying, so liberating, so sweet with absolution, be out of court? Why should that automatically be disallowed?

Wordlessly, the boys reach the bottom of the alleyway and begin the turn toward Michigan Street. Mark’s intent, fiercely concentrated presence beside him makes Jimbo see everything around him in heightened color: the cobbles at their feet glow a particularly poignant greenish-gray, for which he discovers he feels a kind of premature nostalgia, as if they have been, or are soon to be, lost; the dust at the alley’s sunny conclusion burns golden-brown. Jimbo has never seen such beautiful dust—yellow-white light irradiates the floating particles—and a nameless emotion grips his throat.

Around the familiar corner they go, onto dazzled Michigan Street. The sunlight hangs in a dense, shining curtain, through which they pass like spies, like thieves. It occurs to Jimbo that, unlike Mark, he’s pretty frightened, and he cuts the pace in half. Mark rakes him with a glance. “Keep moving, homey, nothing’s going to happen to you.”

“Swell,” Jimbo says.

No one sits on the porches up and down the street, though as far as Jimbo can tell, half the neighborhood might be staring at them through their windows. In front of the second house up on the west side of the street, three giant sunflowers appear to follow him with their single, enormous eyes. Rays of sizzling light surround each sunflower; everything before him, Jimbo notices, is defined by an electric, crackling outline.

Old Skip asleep on his porch is the quietest thing on Michigan Street, Jimbo thinks.

Mark moves up the sidewalk quickly but without obvious haste, and Jimbo does not leave his side. The pavement seems to move up and down with their footsteps, and 3323 breathes in and out, growing with each inhalation.

When Mark’s elbow raps against his ribs, Jimbo realizes that he has not been focusing. “Now we’re going to cut across the lawn, and we’re not going to run. Okay?”

Without waiting for a reply, Mark swivels off the pavement and begins walking across the grass at a nice easy pace. His legs swing out before him, his entire body lopes along, Mark’s effortless grace carrying him between the houses and out of sight before a casual observer would notice that he had left the sidewalk. Beside him, Jimbo feels that he moves like a mule, a camel, an ungainly beast incapable of picking up speed without redistributing its weight.

At the back of the house, the sheer scale of the disorder makes Jimbo gasp. Some of that stuff is waist-high! What Mark called the “pup tent” slants downward, heavy as a scar, just past the kitchen door, ending at a stumpy little wall placed about fifteen feet out into the jungly yard. The addition is carelessly built, and although it is the newest part of the house, it will collapse long before the rest of the structure. Jimbo does not care for the look of that slanting roof, no he does not.

“All right,” Mark says, and sets off into the weeds on the suggestion of a path he had made earlier. Walking behind him, Jimbo sees the house inhale and exhale with every step he takes and starts to panic. Mark says, “For God’s sake, calm down,” and Jimbo realizes that the inhalations and exhalations are his.

Mark jumps the steps to the back door. Jimbo trudges behind him. He sees the empty pane in the kitchen door and peers in at what resembles a haze or cloud, then reveals itself as the kitchen’s grimy ceiling. Grimly, Mark smiles down at him, tilts to the side, and flattens himself against the door. He thrusts his arm through the empty panel. Mark’s smile curdles into a grimace. The knob turns, the door swings open. His mouth now a thin, hard line, Mark gestures for Jimbo to join him. When Jimbo places his feet on the step, Mark clamps a hand on his wrist and without further ceremony propels him into the kitchen.

The

Red

Sky

PART FOUR

15

Now and again during our childhood, Philip and I had the benefit of Pop’s discourses on the female gender—never when Mom was within hearing range, of course. Pop gave us the lowdown on women when we accompanied him on his Saturday “errands,” which involved visits to the houses of his companions Mom disliked or detested. Refreshing stops at local bars and taverns formed the connective tissue between his social calls. Maybe one-third of the time, Philip and I were allowed to come with him into his friends’ houses or apartments. We were allowed into the taverns in about the same proportion.

Going with Pop into his friends’ places and the bars he frequented on Sherman Boulevard and Burleigh was only slightly more satisfying than having to wait in the car. In the car, we could listen to the radio, and in the taverns we could order Cokes. In both the car and the Saracen Lounge at the St. Alwyn Hotel—or Sam n’ Aggie’s Auer Corner, or Noddy’s Sportsmen’s Tavern—we were essentially left alone to quarrel with each other while Pop carried on according to the requirements of the moment. Sometimes I saw money changing hands, usually from his pockets to another man’s hand, but sometimes the other way around; sometimes he helped one of his friends move boxes or heavy objects like electrical saws or water heaters from one place, say, like a warehouse, to another, say, like a garage. In the bars and taverns he installed us in a booth along the wall, got us set up with Cokes, and left us there for an hour or two while he drank beer or played pool with his buddies. Once he commanded us to stay in the car while he went into the Saracen Lounge to “have a talk with a guy,” and after half an hour I got out of the car and peered in the window to see Pop nowhere in the room. In the pit of my stomach, I knew he had left us there, really walked away and left us, but I also knew that he would come back. As he eventually did, from around the corner, his eyes filled with handsome apologies.

Pop’s theories and opinions about women seemed not to apply to Mom. Mom was understood to exist in a separate category, distinct from all other females by reason of being beyond criticism, mostly, and anyway too close at hand to be seen whole. When a single tree fills your lens, the rest of the forest takes on a degree of abstraction. By some such process, Pop enabled himself to arrive at a point of view largely hostile to women without including his wife in the general condemnation.

“Boys,” he said (and now we are in the smoky, beer-stained depths of the Saracen Lounge, where two scoundrels named Bisbee and Livernoise lean forward over the table as if they, not we, were the boys being addressed), “there are two kinds of women, and you better watch out for both of ’em.”

“Thass right,” chimed in Livernoise, commonly called “Legs.” Mom loathed this guy.

“The first kind acts like you’re the feed trough and she’s the pony. Everything you’ve got is fine with her as long as you’ve got it. Of course, anytime you can do better is aces with her, but she will expect you to stay at that level or higher. The deal with this kind of woman is, you don’t go back. Once you get up to steaks and onion rings, the peanut butter and hot dogs are gone for good. So there’s a strain on you, right away from the start. Unless there’s food in that trough, and the food is at least as good as it was the last time, the pony is going out the door. She’ll tell you she loves you, but she’s leaving anyhow, because self-respect means more to her than love. Get it? What you thought you had with her wasn’t what you thought it was, at all. You thought it was about love, or trust, or a good time, or something like that, but all along it was only about her self-respect.

“Now the second kind is like the first, only the part about self-respect is now all about status and possessions. Women like this don’t really have brains, they have mental cash registers. Marry one of ’em, and you’re so far up shit creek you not only don’t have a paddle, you don’t have a boat. You’re up to your neck, dog-paddling to keep your head above the floating crap. You might as well of joined the army, because all day long you’re basically following orders.”

“That’s a Jewish woman you’re describing,” said Bisbee, or maybe it was Legs Livernoise. “I went around with a woman like that, and she was one hundred percent Jew, named Tannenbaum.”

“Could be Jewish, could be Baptist, could be anything,” Pop said. “The Jewish one might be the best at what I told you, but a little Anglo-Saxon bitch with blond hair and no more tits than Legs here can cross her legs and say ‘diamonds’ just as good as if her name was Rachel Goldberg.”

“You just laid it all out, right there,” said Bisbee (I think). “Your boys should be taking notes, only this discussion is way above their little heads.”

“Now,” Pop said, with an odd look in his eye, “there is a third kind of woman, but she is extremely hard to find. Which you might or might not care to do, because this kind of woman will Mixmaster your brains a lot faster than those other two.”

“Don’t get into that now,” said Legs Livernoise, flapping his hands in the air.

“Spare these boys their precious innocence,” said Bisbee.

Neither one of these dodos had any more idea of what Pop was going to say than we did.

“My boys are old enough to handle this information, besides which it is a father’s sacred duty to oversee their education. They should know”—here he looked directly at my brother and myself—“that although the vast majority of the women they will encounter throughout their lives will fall into the first two categories, once in a blue moon the third kind will cross their path.”

“God’s own truth, lads,” Bisbee said.

“The first kind sticks with you as long as the going is good, and the second kind winds up appointing herself president of the corporation of you,” Pop said. “They both take all they can get with both hands, only the second kind of woman is up-front about it because she’s after more than you got right from the start. Now, the third type of woman couldn’t care less how much money you got in the bank, and she don’t give a shit about what kind of car you drive. And that’s what makes her so damn dangerous.”

“Pretty in pink, that’s what they say,” said Legs Livernoise.

“Egg-zack-tically,” Pop said. “This is a woman who can think around corners and see you coming before you get there. She’s always one step ahead. You’re not sure where she’s from, but you know for damn sure it’s not around here. There’s things about her that are different. Plus, she’s so far ahead you’ll never catch up. And believe me, she doesn’t want you to catch up. Because if you do, the fun is all over. Her whole game is, keep you guessing. She wants you up on your toes, with your eyes and your mouth wide open. If you should happen to say, ‘The sky’s a nice blue today,’ she will say, ‘Oh, blue is just blue. Yesterday, the sky was red.’ And you think back, and, you know, yesterday maybe the sky was red.”

“And maybe your head was up your ass,” said Bisbee. “Boys, pardon my French.”

“Up hers, more likely,” said Livernoise.

“That is right,” Pop said. “You boys are too young to know about sex, but it’s never to early to learn a few facts. Sex is an activity shared between men and women, but we enjoy that activity more than they do. It’s different with every person. Sometimes it’s a lot better than others.” He paused, and his face fell into a pattern of serious reflection. For the first time I realized how drunk he was. “Don’t tell Mom anything about this, or I’ll knock your little blocks off. I mean that.” He pointed his finger at us, and left it there until we nodded.

“All right. The point is, with this third woman, the sex is always great. Unless it’s really terrible, but that’s pretty rare, and for those women, the terrible sex works almost the same way as great sex does for the rest of ’em. Because the point is, either way you’re gonna think a lot about that woman. See, these women aren’t interested in the stuff the first two are. They don’t want to get in your wallet, they want to get into your head. And once they get in there, they send down roots, they throw out grappling hooks, they do everything they can to make sure you can’t get them out.

“Remember I said how they don’t care about that stuff like jewelry and houses and whatever else money can buy? They want something else instead, and that something is you. They want you. Inside and out, but especially in. They don’t really want you out in the world, where you can mess around with your friends, they want you in their world, which is a place you never dreamed of before you got there. For all you know, the sky there is red all the livelong day, and up is down, and all the rivers run upstream.”

“Daddy, why is the sky red?” Philip asked, evidently having considered this point for some time.

“To burn the shit out of little knuckleheads like you,” Pop said. His hideous cronies cracked up.

I have often imagined that Philip turned out the way he did because of the kind of person Pop was. Maybe my brother would be the same uptight, ungenerous, cautious prick if Pop had been someone like Dag Hammarskjöld, or even Roy Rogers, but I don’t think so.

Sometimes, at odd moments during the day and always completely unexpectedly, I remember the little boy seated next to me in the Saracen’s booth asking, “Daddy, why is the sky red?” He makes me feel like weeping, like battering my fists against the desk.

16

Mark followed Jimbo through the door with the sudden and unanticipated sense of having found himself at a hinge moment, from which point everything in his life would divide itself into before and after. It was a watershed he had passed at the very moment of its observation. He had no idea why he should have the sense that nothing would be quite the same again, but to deny that sense would be like lying to himself. The perception of the watershed moment, with himself at its center, was almost instantly surpassed by the next moment, in which a tremendous tectonic shift had already happened, leaving him with his second great impression of the morning, that the kitchen, and by implication the rest of the house, was far emptier than he had imagined.

Side by side, he and Jimbo took in a perfectly ordinary, empty room that had been left to itself for the past three or four decades. On the floor, the flurry of their footprints carved tracks in the thick carpet of dust. Fox-brown stains blotched the flaking yellow walls. The room felt extraordinarily hot. The air smelled musty and lifeless. The only sound Mark could hear was Jimbo’s breathing and his own. So it was true, he thought; in the daytime, they were safe here.

At first glance, the kitchen seemed to be around the same size and shape as the kitchen in Mark’s house. The arch to the dining room seemed to replicate its counterpart across the alley. The rooms might have been a bit smaller. Apart from the absence of a stove and the refrigerator, the great difference between this room and the Underhill kitchen lay in the wall to his left, the one that replaced the exterior wall at home. This wall had no window to look out upon the brief length of grass leading to the next house. It seemed never to have held the spice racks and shelves for cookbooks, little figurines of dogs and cats, and china miniatures of shepherds and shepherdesses that stood in that position in the Underhill household. What it had instead was the door, snugly fitted into the frame, he had noticed the last time.

“Well?” Jimbo nodded at the door in a you-first manner.

“We’ll get to that,” Mark said. “First, let’s look out the front windows and see if anybody noticed us.”

“Yo, whatever,” Jimbo said, acting cooler than he felt.

Mark moved across the room and discovered, just as he was about to pass through the narrower of the two arches, that the house was not as empty as he had supposed. A shrouded, boxlike object that could only be a table beneath a bedsheet occupied the middle of the dining room. Through the wider arch beyond he could see the shapes of other pieces of furniture draped in sheets. When the owners decamped, they had left behind two good-sized chairs and a long sofa. Why would anyone move out and leave good furniture behind?

With Jimbo breathing noisily in his ear, Mark went through to the living room. Remembering what Jimbo had thought he had seen, and his own vision, or half-vision, of the day before that, Mark looked for footprints in the dust. He saw only tracings, loops and swirls like writing in an unknown alphabet inscribed with the lightest possible pressure of a quill pen. Neither Jimbo’s threatening giant, his own monstrous figure of warning, or the girl could have made these faint, delicate patterns. The same hand, that of neglect, had scrawled its ornate but meaningless patterns on the walls. These had faded to the colorlessness of mist—as if you could punch your hands through the unreadable writing and touch nothing more substantial than smoke.

17

Of course nobody saw us,Jimbo thought, nobody ever really looks at this house. Even when the neighbors get together to mow the lawn, they pretend they’re somewhere else. And the last thing they ever do is look in the windows. We could dance naked in here, and they wouldn’t see a thing.

While Mark gazed at the walls and saw God knows what, Jimbo moved toward the big front window without, despite what had just gone through his mind, getting so close to it that he could easily be seen from the street. Deep striations in the film over the glass caught the light and stood out like runes.

With the passing of a cloud, the bright streaks and swirls on the window heightened into beaten gold, a color too rich for late morning in the Midwest. Within Jimbo, something, a particle of his being that felt like remembered pain, moved as if it had been touched. A sense of bereft abandonment passed through him like an X ray, and in sudden confusion he turned from the window. The sheets sagging over the furniture in the living room spoke of a thousand lost things.

Jimbo turned back to the window. The golden runes had faded back into the gaps between smears of dust that offered him an oddly unexpected vision of Michigan Street. Directly opposite stood two houses, the Rochenkos’ and Old Man Hillyard’s. Although Jimbo knew exactly what these structures looked like, it was as if he had never quite seen them before. From this vantage point, the Rochenko and Hillyard houses seemed subtly different in nature, remote, more mysterious.

A sound like the rustle of fabric over fabric reached Jimbo from somewhere close at hand, and he jerked his head and looked over his shoulder at . . . what? Some white scrap, briefly visible in the murky air? He was spooked enough to ask, “Did you hear that?”

“You heard something?” Mark took his hand from the wall he had been examining and looked at Jimbo in a manner far too intense for his liking.

“No. Sorry.”

“Let’s start upstairs, or down here—with that.” Mark only barely nodded toward the kitchen and the rear of the house. “Upstairs, what do you say?”

Why ask me?Jimbo wondered, then realized that he was being told, not asked. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “And what are we looking for, exactly?”

“Whatever we can find. Especially anything with a name on it—like envelopes. We can always Google a name. Pictures would be good. ”

One flight up, the stairs ended at a bleak hallway and the narrow, steeply pitched flight of stairs to the attic. Without a word or a glance, Mark turned to them and went up.

Jimbo came through the attic door and saw that the roof formed an inverted V with its peak about eight feet above the floor. From this peak, the roof slanted steeply down over a hodgepodge of tables, chairs, and dressers.

Ten minutes later, Jimbo wiped sweat from his forehead and looked across the attic to see his friend methodically searching the drawers of a highboy. How many hours would Mark insist spending on this search?

Sweat seemed to leak from Jimbo’s every pore. When he leaned over a chest or opened a box, sweat dripped into his eyes and plopped softly onto the surface of whatever he was trying to look at.

Just off to the right, Jimbo thought he saw an upright human body wrapped in a sheet, and fear blasted through his system. With a small cry of shock, he straightened up and turned to face the shrouded figure.

“What?”Mark said.

Jimbo was staring at his own pop-eyed, shiny face looking at him from within a full-length mirror in an oval wooden frame. He had turned himself into a horror movie cliché.

“Nothing. Jesus, it just feels creepy, messing around up here.”

“There has to be something,” Mark said, mostly to himself. He wrenched a tiny drawer out of a flimsy-looking lamp table. “Whoever they were, they left in a hurry. Look at the way this stuff is crammed in here. Even if they were trying to hide shit, probably they got too sloppy to do it right.”

“You know,” Jimbo said, “I’d just like to get out of this attic.”

Twenty minutes later, they were going back down the narrow staircase. The second floor felt ten degrees cooler than the attic. As a result of having kicked the legs of a little wooden table into splinters, Mark limped slightly during the descent.

Thinking of what waited for them on the ground floor, Jimbo almost hoped that they would spend a long time upstairs.

The second floor of 3323 North Michigan Street consisted of two bedrooms and a bathroom linked by a common hallway. In the smaller of the bedrooms, two single beds, one with a deeply stained mattress, had been pushed against opposite walls. The bare wooden floor was scuffed, scratched, and dirty. Mark followed Jimbo into the room, frowned at the stained mattress, and flipped it on its side. Dull brown smears in a pattern like paisley covered the bottom of the mattress.

“Ugh, look at that shit.”

“You think it’s shit? I don’t, I think—”

“You don’t know what it is, and neither do I.” Mark lowered the awful mattress back into place. Then he bent down and looked under the bed. He did the same on the other side of the room.

Mark gave the bathroom a desultory once-over. Dead spider webs hung in tatters from the window, and a living spider only slightly smaller than a mouse fought to scale the inner slope of the bathtub. Gritty white powder lay across the floor tiles.

A double bed butted against the inner wall of the larger bedroom. The same gritty white powder covered the floor, and when Jimbo looked up he saw yellow-brown wounds in the ceiling. A wooden crucifix hung over the headboard.

Mark dipped down and looked under the bed. He uttered a sound that combined surprise and disgust and duckwalked backward, trailing his finger along the dusty join between two planks.

Before Jimbo could ask what he was doing, Mark jumped up. He wandered to the opposite wall.

Jimbo went to the window. Again, the unfamiliar angle distorted a well-known landscape. The buildings tilted forward, diminished by perspective and also by what felt like someone else’s hatred, suspicion, and fear. He shuddered, and the scene before him snapped back into ordinary reality.

“I have this feeling . . .” Mark was leaning against the inner wall. Slowly, he turned his head and regarded the closet.

“About what?” Jimbo said.

Mark moved along the wall, opened the door, and leaned in.

“Anything there?”

Mark disappeared inside.

Jimbo moved toward the closet and heard a sound as of something sliding off a shelf. Smiling, Mark reappeared through the door. He was holding a dust-covered object Jimbo needed a moment to recognize as an old photo album.

Jimbo had no way of knowing, and Mark had no intention of telling him, that the smile on his face had been inspired not by the photo album, but by something else altogether—a door set into the back of the closet. A certain theory about the house he was at last exploring had begun to form in his mind, and the door inside the closet seemed to confirm it.

“Bingo!”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Let’s take a look.” He went to the window and held the album in the light. Dark gray with accumulated dust, it had once been a deep forest green. Quilted plastic rectangles made to resemble cloth surrounded a central plate that read FAVORITE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS. Mark opened the cover to the first page of photographs.

A heavy-set young man wearing a long black coat and heavy boots bent sideways on the bumper of an old Ford and shielded his face with a hand. In the second photograph the same young man’s face was a stationary blur as he stood with his arm around a smiling girl whose dead-straight hair fell nearly to her waist.

“I don’t believe it,” Mark said. “Look at this.”

Shrouded by his long coat, his back to the camera, the man bent over a table littered with clamps, sanders, and jars of nails.

Then came a photograph taken directly outside this house. The lawn was barer, the trees looked smaller. Showing only the top of his head, the man held the branchy arms of a small boy of five or six.

As if having a son had released something in him, the three photographs that followed caught him in the midst of a social gathering seemingly located at a lakeside tavern. Wearing his usual garb, the man had been photographed in conversation with other men of his age or older. Here he was standing on a dock next to the tavern, here he perched on an overturned rowboat with two other men and a woman with plucked eyebrows and a cigarette in her mouth. In every photograph, the man’s stance made his face unavailable to the camera.

“What’s your name, you asshole?” Mark said. “Don’t want to show your face to the camera, do you?”

“I’m sorry, this is creeping me out,” Jimbo said. “The guy in your kitchen didn’t show his face, either.”

“Because this is him, get it? He’s the guy.”

“This is way too scary for me,” Jimbo said. “Sorry. We should never have come in here. We should have left the whole thing alone right from the start.”

“Shut up.”

Mark was scowling down at the photographs. He abruptly bent his neck and lowered his head closer to the page. “I wonder . . .” He raised his hand and pointed at a rangy, cowpoke-like man also seated on the overturned rowboat. “Does that guy look familiar to you?”

Mark was never going to let him off the hook. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you, but I can’t do anything about it. Now look at the guy I’m pointing at.”

Jimbo thought the man looked a little like the Marlboro Man in old advertisements, but he knew better than to say this out loud.

“Come on, look close. Imagine him with a lot of wrinkles.”

“Thisis Old Man Hillyard? I don’t believe it.” He looked more closely at the man sitting on the upturned rowboat and almost succeeded in superimposing his features over Mr. Hillyard’s. “Maybe it is.”

“Sure, it is. Hillyard knew this guy, see? He’s talking to him, they’re having a few beers together. We have to talk to Old Man Hillyard.”

“I could do that,” Jimbo said, seeing an excuse for getting out of the house.

“Yeah, he likes you now, doesn’t he?” After twisting his ankle the week previous, Mr. Hillyard had signaled to Jimbo and asked him to pick up his groceries for him. “Go see him this afternoon. In fact, talk to everyone on the block who looks old enough to have known this guy.”

Now Jimbo’s gratitude at an honorable reason for escaping the genuinely oppressive atmosphere of the house met the sudden suspicion that Mark seemed to be trying to get rid of him.

“What about you?”

“Are you serious? While you’re going around the neighborhood, I’ll be here.”

The strange room downstairs, which had never been far from his thoughts, surged fully into Jimbo’s consciousness. The farther he could get from that thing, the better he would feel. It was as if it radiated an unnatural heat, or an unwholesome odor.

Mark’s eyes were curiously large and bright. “Both of us don’t have to poke around in this place. Anyhow, you don’t want to be here, do you?”

Jimbo stepped back, his face filled with suspicion. Contradictory impulses battled in him—Mark really did seem to be putting him on the sidelines. Then he thought again of the man in the photographs and the room downstairs they had yet to enter, and supposed he would be more useful outside the house than in.

“This place doesn’t feel right,” he said. “It’s like it’s all cramped up, or something. It has this terrible feeling.”

That was the truth. Jimbo felt as though he were wading through some unclean substance that would harden around his ankles if he stood still too long. Mark’s ghostly spider webs had been a version of this same feeling.

“You should see where I found the pictures,” Mark said.

No, I shouldn’t,Jimbo thought, but he moved forward and went through the door.

There was barely room enough for the two of them in the closet, and the darkness made it difficult to see what Mark was doing. He seemed to be pushing on a high shelf above the clothes rail. The shelf slid up. Mark stepped in closer and opened a panel at the back of the closet.

“Look.”

Jimbo came forward, and Mark leaned to the side and reached into the darkness.

“Can you see?”

“Not really.”

“Come around and stick your hand in.”

They jostled around each other, and Jimbo bent forward and pushed his right hand into a half-visible opening.

“Feel the bottom,” Mark said.

The wooden surface felt furry and scratchy, and softer than it should have been, like the hide of a long-dead bear.

“The wood’s a little rotten,” Mark said from behind him.

Jimbo’s fingers encountered a raised screw, a small hole, a raised edge. “I got something.”

“Pull up on it.”

An inner flap detached from the floor of the hidden cabinet. Jimbo probed into the opening and found a sunken compartment about a foot long, two feet wide, and five or six inches deep. “This is where you found the album?”

“Right in there.”

Jimbo pulled his hand from the secret compartment, and both boys backed out into the room.

“How did you find the flap? How did you know it was there?”

“I guessed.”

Jimbo squinted at him in frustration.

“This place is supposed to be identical to my house, isn’t it?”

“I thought so. But the rooms look a little smaller.”

“You got it,” Mark said. “That’s why the rooms seem so cramped to you. Almost all of them are smaller than the rooms in my house. On the outside, though, it’s identical. The extra space had to be somewhere.”

“You mean there are hiding places all over this house?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Mark said, not saying at least half of what he was thinking.

Without any desire for greater precision, Jimbo immediately understood that hideous possibilities lay in this arrangement.

“Let’s say you had someone, a girl, locked in this house,” Mark said. “She would think she was safe, but . . .”

This was the possibility Jimbo least wished to consider. “If you were hidden in one of these secret places, you could come out anytime you liked.” Saying it made him feel ill.

“This house has to have a really terrible history,” Mark said.

“Its present isn’t all that wonderful. I mean, Mark, the place really gives me the creeps. It’s almost like there’s someone else in here with us.”

“I know what you mean,” Mark said. “Let’s go downstairs and get it over with. I’ll do the real searching tomorrow.”

One floor down, the boys roamed through the living room and the dining room, exploring closets and cabinets and examining the floorboards for secret caches. Mark appeared to be observing architectural eccentricities he was not bothering to describe. He lifted his eyebrows, he pushed his lips in and out, he went through all these little gestures of thought and comprehension. Whatever he was comprehending he kept to himself.

Too soon for Jimbo’s comfort, they found themselves back in the kitchen. If anything, he felt worse about that extra room than he had earlier. A bad, bad feeling seemed to flow directly from it. As if in response, the door in the wall seemed to have grown larger, taken on increased density.

“I’m not sure I want to see what’s in there,” he said.

“Then don’t go in.”

Mark went to the door and pulled it open. He stepped back, making it possible for Jimbo, whose heart felt as though it were in free fall, to move up alongside him. Within, the boys could see only a flat sheet of darkness. Mark made a noise low in his throat and went up to the door, and Jimbo trailed a reluctant half step behind.

“We’re just going to do this,” Mark said. “It’s only an empty room, that’s all.” With a single step, he moved into the dark room. Jimbo hesitated for a moment, swallowed, and went after him into the darkness. Suddenly his face felt hot.

“I should have brought that flashlight,” Mark said.

“Yeah,” Jimbo said, without at all agreeing.

Their eyes began to adjust. Jimbo was reminded of that moment when you walk into a dark theater and pause before moving down the aisle. The featureless darkness faded to a grainy shadowland. Jimbo became aware of a faint but serious odor. Here, something animal and unpleasant had been added to the smell of emptiness and defeat exuded by the rest of the house. He realized that he was looking at a large object with a shape at once familiar and foreign.

“Shit fuck damn. What the hell is that?”

“I think it’s a bed.”

“That thing can’t be a bed, ” Mark said. They moved closer to the object that dominated the room. It extended sideways under the slanting roofline and bore an initial resemblance to a bed—the bed of a cruel giant who nightly collapsed into it drunk. Thick, crude ten-foot timbers defined the sides, and sloppily assembled planks formed the rough platform on which the giant slept. They moved in closer, and without indicating anything in particular, Mark said, “Uh-oh.”

“I wouldn’t want to spend the night on that thing,” Jimbo said.

“No, look.” Mark pointed at what Jimbo had taken for a darkness in the grain of the long planks. In the center of the darkness, a pair of leather cuffs about three feet apart were fastened to the platform with chains. Another pair of restraints, a little farther apart, had been chained to the platform about four feet beneath them.

“The legs are bolted to the floor,” Mark said. His eyes shone in the darkness.

“Who was this for?” Then Jimbo noticed that the series of blotches, which seemed to be black, around and between the restraints were not an element of the grain. “I’m getting out of here. Sorry, man.”

He was already moving toward the door, holding up his hands as if to ward off an attacker. With a last look at the huge bed, Mark joined him. On the other side of the door, they glanced at each other, and Jimbo was afraid that Mark was going to say something, but he looked away and kept his thoughts to himself.

Feeling as weightless and vague as ghosts, they went out onto the broken little porch. Something had happened to them, Jimbo thought; something had happened to him anyhow, but he could not begin to define what it was. All the breath and most of the life had been driven from his body, as if by a great shock. What was left was just enough to float down the steps into the lush tangle of the backyard.

Jimbo remained silent until they were walking across the mown grass at the side of the house, and then he found he had to speak. “It was built to hold a kid—that bed-thing.”

Mark stopped moving and looked back.

“He strapped a kid, or maybe even a couple of kids, onto that bed-thing, and he tortured them.” He felt as though he were banging on a bass drum. “Because those were bloodstains, weren’t they? They looked black, but it was blood.”

“I think those stains on the mattress upstairs were blood, too.”

“Good God, Mark, what kind of place is that?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Mark said. “Unless you changed your mind about helping me. If so, tell me right now. Are you quitting?”

“No, I’ll do what you want,” Jimbo said. “But I still say we should never have gotten involved in this stuff.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Mark said. “You know what? I feel like I was kind of selected . I agree with you, it’s terrible and it’s scary—but it killed my mother! ”

“How? Explain it to me, will you?”

“I DON’T KNOW HOW!” Mark yelled. “What do you think we’re DOING here, anyhow?”

Then, for no reason Jimbo could see, Mark’s eyes changed. His face went slack and dopey. Mark looked at his empty hands, then at the ground. “Holy shit.” Still looking at the ground, he went four or five feet back the way they had come. “Jimbo, what the hell happened to that photograph album?”

Jimbo blinked.

“Did I give it to you?”

“No. You had it when we came down the stairs.”

“I must have left it in the kitchen.” Mark was nodding his head. “I didn’t take it in the room, did I?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I must have set it down on a counter so my hands would be free.”

“No,” Jimbo said, knowing what Mark intended to do. “Leave it. You already saw the pictures.”

But Mark had already set off back toward the undergrowth, and in another second he was following the path they had beaten.

“I don’t believe you’re doing this.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be right back.”

To Jimbo, it was inconceivable that anyone, even Mark, would be willing to expose himself a second time to the interior of 3323. He understood why the neighborhood had silently agreed to forget about the empty house in their midst, to let their eyes go out of focus when they happened accidentally to find themselves looking at it. There were things you shouldn’t look at, things better not seen.

He sat down and waited. The intense heat amplified the buzzing and clicking of insects hidden in the tall grass. Sweat dripped down the back of his neck and slithered over his ribs, cooling his skin. He kept his eyes on the back door at the top of the broken steps. His shoulders had become uncomfortably hot. He twitched at his T-shirt and rubbed his shoulders, still watching the door.

Jimbo moved around on the grass, searching for a more comfortable place to sit. He wondered if any dead chipmunks or squirrels might be decomposing in his vicinity.

Looking at his watch was a useless gesture, since he had no idea what time it had been when Mark went back into the kitchen. He looked at his watch anyway: 12:30 P.M. Amazing. They must have been in the house for two and a half hours. It had felt much shorter than that. It was almost as if the house had hypnotized him. The thought made him glance again at his watch. Its hands had not moved.

Of course the second hand was in motion, sweeping in its inexorable, clockwise way around the circle of the dial. The little needle darted from 22 to 23, on its way to 30. Jimbo glanced across the top of the grasses at the back door. It looked as though it had never been opened.

The moving needle rolled across the finish line and without hesitation launched into a brand-new minute. Jimbo’s eyes lifted to the sinister door, and relief washed through him, followed by an intense flash of anger. Through the opening doorway stepped Mark Underhill, carrying the ugly photo album and signaling apology with his every glance and gesture. Jimbo jumped to his feet. “What took you so long?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Mark said.

“Don’t you know how worried I was? Did you forget I was out here waiting for you?”

“Yo, Jimbo, I said I was sorry.”

“Your ass is sorry!”

Mark stared at him with a fixed glare. Jimbo had no idea what he was thinking. His face was still unnaturally pale. Even Mark’s lips looked white. “Didn’t you ask what took so much time?”

“Yes. What took so much time?”

“I couldn’t find the damn thing anywhere. I looked all around the kitchen, I even looked in the, you know.”

“The room with the bed.”

Mark nodded. “I went back upstairs. Guess where I found it.”

Jimbo gave him the only possible answer. “Back in the closet.”

“That’s right. It was back in the closet.”

“Well, how did it get there?”

“I want to think about that,” Mark said. “Don’t say anything, okay? Please. Any opinion you have, keep it to yourself.”

“Here’s one opinion I’m not keeping to myself—you can’t go back inside that place. And you know it! Look how scared you are. Your face is completely white.”

“I think I could have left it there, maybe.”

Around and around they went, Mark now claiming to be unable to remember if he had been holding the album as they went downstairs, Jimbo unable to remember if he had seen him carrying it. They were still arguing about it, though less heatedly, when they reached the bottom of Michigan Street. They turned the corner into the alley, and fell silent as if by mutual agreement. Before they parted, Mark asked to borrow the Monaghans’ Maglite, and Jimbo ran up the block and got it for him. He handed over the heavy flashlight without asking any questions.

18

From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 23 June 2003

It’s astounding. Philip had no idea of who used to live in the house across the alley from him. If he ever did know, he made himself forget it. Proximity to the home base of one of the nation’s livelier serial killers could induce denial in people a lot less prone to it than Philip. And Philip, of course, had the added incentive of being shamefully aware of being married to the serial killer’s first cousin. A share of his blood ran in her veins, a smaller share in their son’s. Can that be the reason for Philip’s dismissal of the boy? Philip loves Mark, I know that, but his love doesn’t stop him from constantly undermining him.

Thanks to Jimbo Monaghan and Omar Hillyard, I know that Philip bought the house directly behind Kalendar’s, but the purchase had to have been innocent. I don’t think he could have bought his place if he had known it was right behind Kalendar’s. And of course Philip bought it in a typical rush. He wanted to get out of the suburbs, where his neighbors made him feel outclassed, and he liked the idea of living in the old neighborhood, close to his school. He rushed in, thinking he understood everything, and if he ever picked up a hint about the previous owner of the house across the alley, he closed his mind to it on the spot.

When I learned about Kalendar’s house across the alley, I did not say anything to Philip until I showed him the two strange e-mails Mark had sent me before his disappearance, and even then I waited until we were in the police station with Sergeant Pohlhaus. It was quite clear to me that speaking of these matters with Philip alone would be a waste of effort. The first e-mail showed up in my Inbox two days before Mark vanished, the second the day before. Reading the e-mails only cranked up Philip’s suspicion that Mark and I had been engaged in some kind of conspiracy. Once Philip read the e-mails, he insisted on showing them to Pohlhaus, which was obviously the right thing to do. Pohlhaus read them, asked both of us a few questions, and put the printouts of the e-mails into a folder he kept in his bottom drawer. “You never know,” he said, but as he said it, he sighed. I did my best—I told them both about the connection to Joseph Kalendar, but I might as well have been talking to a couple of dogs.

From: munderhill697@aol.com

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 3:24 PM

Subject: crazy but not that crazy

hi unc

wondering how u r these daze, been thinking abt u. it isn’t e z living here after what happened 2 mom. hard 2 concentrate, hard 2 keep myself in focus. now that i’m finally writing, i don’t really know what 2 say.

do u ever get some idea u think is totally messed-up mad crazy, and it turns out 2 b right? or good?

b cool

m

“Did you write back?” asked Philip; Sergeant Pohlhaus asked, “Did you respond to the boy’s e-mail?”

“Sure,” I said. “I wrote that it happens once or twice a week.”

Here is his second e-mail to me:

From: munderhill697@aol.com

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 4:18 PM

Subject: Re: crazy but not that crazy

hi unc t—

deeper & deeper we go, and where we come out nobody knows . . .

so what I want to ask u is . . .

do u ever feel like u r in 1 of your own books? does the world ever feel that way 2 u?—like a tu book?

thanx,

m

“What did you tell him?” asked Philip and Sergeant Pohlhaus.

“I told him ‘never’ and ‘all the time,’” I said.

“I’m sorry?” said Sergeant Pohlhaus. He was a steely, whiplike man, and his question indicated that he was not amused.

So I showed him my e-mail:

From: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

To: munderhill697@aol.com

Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 7:45 PM

Subject: Re: crazy but not that crazy

Dear Mark,

>do u ever feel like u r in 1 of your own books? does the world >ever feel that way 2 u?—like a tu book?

Answer:

(1) Never.

(2) All the time.

What the hell is going on out there, anyhow?

Unc T

“He never answered,” I said. “But don’t you think that this mysterious project is probably involved in his disappearance?”

“Maybe,” Philip said.

Both Sergeant Pohlhaus and I looked at him. We were in a room crowded with desks. Plainclothes policemen were talking into their phones and typing up reports. When I asked Pohlhaus what the room was called, he gave me a funny look and said, “The bullpen,” as if that was something everyone should know.

“This so-called project obviously had something to do with the Sherman Park Killer,” Philip said.

“I think it was about something else,” I said. “I just learned that Mark and his friend Jimbo let themselves into that house behind yours, Philip, and after that I think Mark spent a lot of time there by himself. I think the house was his project. Or the project took place in that house. It used to belong to Joseph Kalendar.”

“That’s impossible,” Philip said. “My wife would have told me.” He looked at Pohlhaus. “This isn’t something I want everybody to know, but my wife and Kalendar were cousins.”

“That’s interesting,” Pohlhaus said. “It would have been logical for her to have said something about it at the time.”

“Philip,” I said, “did you let Nancy see your house before you bought it?”

“Why would I have done that? It was in the right neighborhood, and all the houses are pretty much alike. Besides, I had to act fast.”

“So she didn’t know until it was too late to back out. Once she realized where the new house was, I think she wanted to protect you.”

“To protect me? That’s . . . that’s . . .” He fell silent and seemed to ponder the matter.

“Mark was fascinated with that house,” I told Pohlhaus. “He was obsessed with it.”

“A kid would be,” Pohlhaus said. “There must be a lot of bloodstains in there. Probably a lot of other stuff, too.”

“Don’t you think you ought to go over there and take a look?”

“Hang on, maybe we already did.” Without explaining what he had just said, Pohlhaus took a little notebook from his pocket and flipped through it until he came to the page he wanted. “Is the address of that house 3323 North Michigan Street?”

I said, “Yes,” and Philip said, “How am I supposed to know?”

“It is?” Pohlhaus asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He looked at Philip. “Your son and his friend called us on the seventh of June. They wanted to inform us of their suspicions that the Sherman Park Killer had been taking refuge in an abandoned residence at 3323 North Michigan.”

“There you are,” Philip said. “That proves I’m right. Mark and that dummy were snooping around, pretending to be great detectives like your friend Pasmore. I should have known.” He looked as though he were going to spit on the floor.

“Did you know they called the police?”

“What, you think they’d tell me?” Here I got a flat, triumphant glare. “That’s why he was interested in the place. They must have seen someone in there.” He looked at Pohlhaus, whose impervious demeanor had not changed since Philip and I had come into the “bullpen.” “You guys checked it out, I’m sure.”

“We went over and had a look. The place was locked up. Had been for years.”

“You never got back in touch with my son?”

“He gave us a tip, we checked it out, and it went nowhere, like most of the tips we get from the public. We don’t follow up unless we find something useful.”

“It went nowhere, huh? Is that what you thought after my son disappeared?”

“Mr. Underhill, I am very sorry about your son, and we’re doing everything we can to find him.”

“You sit here and say that to me. Didn’t it occur to you that my son could have drawn attention to himself by his investigative efforts?”

“Not if our bad boy wasn’t there,” Pohlhaus said.

My brother looked back at me. “But that’s what all this garbage in the e-mails is about, isn’t it? These crazy ideas, and feeling like he’s in one of your books? He wants you to know he’s playing detective.”

“He could be talking about something else,” I said.

“I certainly hope you’ll let me in on whatever it is you have in mind.”

I glanced at Pohlhaus. “It seems to me that you should go back to that house and give it a much closer inspection.”

“Another country heard from,” Pohlhaus said.

The day after the break-in, Mark took the photograph album with him when he returned to the empty house. He did not want to leave it at home. His father was getting weird enough to start searching his room, and the album would be impossible to explain. Best to stow the album in its original hiding place, where it would be safe from parental discovery. Also, he wanted to consult the photographs, to go over them many times, dredging for whatever information he could pick up; since he planned to spend most of the day in that house, he more or less had to bring the pictures with him.

Late that morning, he and Jimbo had worked out the day’s schedule on their cell phones. They were both basically still in bed. Mark, having showered and dressed, was lying supine on top of the blanket while Jimbo was still prone between his sheets.

“Phase Two, I get it,” Jimbo said. “Let’s get together at the Sherman Diner around lunchtime and compare notes, okay?”

The Sherman Diner, two doors down from the former site of the old Beldame Oriental Theater, was an unofficial hangout for Quincy students. Jimbo’s mentioning it meant that he wanted to swap information with Mark but felt like seeing other people afterward. At this time, all the students in the area were constantly gabbing on their cell phones about the local murderer.

Mark said, “You go, if you want. I don’t think I’m going to be very interested in food, and I don’t feel like explaining myself to the kids who’ll be there. We’ll talk later.”

“When, like.”

“Whenever I’m done for the day, Jimbo. You have plenty to keep you busy.”

“I know.” Jimbo sounded a bit aggrieved.

He probably sensed that his best friend was holding out on him. Mark was indeed holding out on him, and he intended to keep on doing just that. While going through the house the day before, Mark had noticed many curiosities that he had not mentioned to Jimbo. In a sense, he had given Jimbo the key to understanding these oddities (if, that is, he was right about them, as he was almost certain he was), so technically perhaps he had withheld nothing. But Mark had known that Jimbo would not understand what to do with the key, or what it meant, or even that it was a key. The house, Mark had concluded, held an immense secret that had been built into it by the same madman who had added the ugly little room and created the giant’s bed.

After getting off the phone with Jimbo, Mark went downstairs and prowled through the refrigerator. Mark’s father shopped only when forced to do so, and he tended to buy unrelated items like bottles of olives, peanut brittle, pickles, lite mayonnaise, and Wonder Bread. On his first foray through the shelves, Mark thought he might have to go over to the 7-Eleven before getting down to business, but his next pass took in the sliding drawer, which yielded cheddar cheese, cream cheese, and some sliced salami that still looked edible. He made a salami and cheddar cheese sandwich with mayo and slid the gooey thing into a plastic bag. Then he put both the sandwich and the photograph album into a paper bag that already held a crowbar, a ripping hammer, and the Maglite, and went outside, rolling down the top of the bag to make it look smaller.

Out into the hot white sunlight he steps, our heroic boy, out into the oven the sun has made of these poor streets, moving like a jockey toward the winner’s circle, like a conqueror toward his mistress’s tent. For once in his life, he feels locked in, prepared for the first stage of whatever destiny will turn out to be destined for him. His fear—for he is actually filled with fear—seems to energize him, to increase his sense of purpose.

Such a manner invites rather than repels notice, and not long after he turns onto Michigan Street and begins his purposeful march toward the fourth house up the block, one Michigan Street resident inclines his head toward his living room window and immediately takes him in.

There’s that good-looking Underhill kid,thinks Omar Hillyard, on his way to the old Kalendar house again, I bet. Where’s Sancho Panza, the little Irish bulldog who goes everywhere with him?

God, what a handsome kid. Bold as brass! Look at him come cutting right up alongside that house . . . he’s breaking in, for sure. Little demon! If I were the Irish bulldog, I’d be wildly in love with him.

I bet he finds more than he bargained for inside the Kalendar place.

Enjoying the sensation of light warming his arms and shoulders, Mark moved onto the grass. His legs carried him along, stride after rhythmic stride. If he wanted to, Mark could walk to the Rocky Mountains, jump up one side, down the other, and roll on until he was standing ankle-deep in the Pacific.

He plunged through the tall grasses and parched weeds, bounded up the broken wooden steps, and after the slightest hesitation, opened the back door. Here was the giant’s house, and here was he, Mark the giant killer and his little bag of tricks. He had half-expected some form of resistance to his entrance, but his coming alone did not invoke the invisible spider webs and the emotional miasma of his first visit. He passed unimpeded through the door, and without bothering to check out the room containing the obscene bed, carried his laden paper bag up the stairs to the master bedroom.

An excellent carpenter had once lived in this house. The sloppiness of the addition amounted to a deliberate deception: anyone who saw it would be unlikely to guess at the extent of the adjustments its maker had made to the fabric of his house. The sheer monstrosity of the torture bed also had to be deliberate—the carpenter had built an object commensurate with the enormity of his feelings. However, when free to exercise the full extent of his skill, he had set in place a kind of builder’s tour de force. This was what Mark had not revealed to his best friend.

Up in the bedroom, he took the crowbar from his bag and used it to pry away a section of the panel in the back of the closet. Plaster and bits of broken lathe rattled to the floor.

He had found the photograph album within a small, square, tablelike construction to the side of the vacancy he had just enlarged. The little table looked as though it had been built to hold a lamp, but Mark knew it had two very different purposes. It provided a perfect place to sit unseen and listen to what was going on in the house. It was a seat for a domestic spy and terrorist, and that it had been built at all demonstrated the extent of the builder’s psychosis. By means of a secret, sliding catch, the little box also opened up to become a concealed vault or safe.

Mark stepped into the space he had widened and saw that his secret theory about the house was fact. His heart climbed into his throat, and for a couple of seconds, the sheer weight of his fear made it impossible for him to move forward or back. He wished he hadn’t been right: the hiding places that had spooked Jimbo were bad enough, but this was much worse. This was a kind of demented savagery.

He was looking at another wall, separated from the back of the closet by perhaps three feet. After four or five feet, the gap between the inner and outer walls disappeared into darkness. This was a madman’s house, and it resembled the workings of his mind, being riddled with unseen, unseeable passageways. Mark would have bet his right arm and leg that this one continued all the way to the other side of the house. He went back into the bedroom for the Maglite.

Once again in the closet, he passed through the opening and turned on the Maglite to send a beam of cool yellow light, wobbling with the trembling of his hand, down a narrow, rubble-strewn corridor. He turned around, and the same thing happened on the other side. His mouth was completely dry. There it was, exactly as he had supposed. Mark was looking at the first few yards of an invented corridor. It proved him right about the nature of the carpenter’s modifications. To see if the other part of his theory was correct, he had only to make his way down the narrow passage.

Because what happened at the end of this sadistic secret hallway? Did it just run bang straight into the wall, or did it, as he hoped. . . . The narrow beam of light struck a blind wall, and disappointment squeezed his heart. The flashlight drooped in this hand, and the trembling yellow circle of light wavered down over the lifeless plaster and slipped, like a waterfall down the face of a cliff, into a space beneath the level of the floor. Mark heard himself exhale. There was no reason for his having been right to have meant anything more than that he had been clever, but he stepped forward to see the first few steps of the descending staircase with nearly a sense of gratification. The house was a honeycomb.

The man who owned this house had lived alone—he had either killed his family or sent them away. In any case, children had died on the great wooden bed and in the small single bed on the second floor. Once he had eliminated his family, the man had enticed women into this house, or he’d pounced on them in the dark, tied them up, and carried them in. The doors would have been locked, and the windows would have been boarded up. The women had found themselves alone in a house they could not leave. Soon, they would have heard him moving through the house, and they would have tried to run from him, but he would have seemed to rove invisibly from room to room, following their every move. He was like a great spider speeding across his web, and he was capable of appearing anywhere. He liked peering through his peepholes and watching the trapped women. He liked killing them, too, but he loved tormenting them.

Mark felt weak with a mixture of exhilaration, terror, and nausea. He had thrust his way into the evil heart of this poisoned house, and what he saw there sickened him.

Instead of going down the steep stairs, Mark retraced his steps. This time, he saw the drifting tatters of the big spider webs he earlier had failed to notice. Real spider webs did not bother him.

As he had imagined, a second, matching staircase led to the ground floor on the other side of the house. He walked down in the darkness, training the flashlight on the descending steps. At the bottom of the stairs, the Maglite revealed two short corridors branching off to the front and back of the building. Each seemed to end at a door that fit flush into the wall. The monster had wanted to move invisibly around the ground floor of his house, too. What Mark had not expected to find was the yawning mouth of yet a third staircase. He and Jimbo had forgotten all about the basement. An unexpected shiver brushed his lungs with frost.

The basement—why did that sound like a colossally bad idea? You never knew what you might find in a basement, that was one reason.

In spite of these feelings, Mark began moving downstairs through veils of cobwebs. Down, down, down through layers of wickedness, layers of pain and torture, to the cloaca beneath. At the bottom of the steps, the flashlight cast a grainy yellow bull’s-eye on a black panel that looked as though it had been pried off a coffin. There seemed to be no doorknob or handle. Experimentally, Mark extended his left arm and prodded the door with his fingers. As if on a great black hinge, the door instantly flew open.

He stepped through the opening and played the flashlight along what looked like a stockade fence. Then he turned around and shone the beam close to the opening in the wall, by reflex looking for a light switch. He found one immediately to the left of the concealed staircase, and before realizing that the power had been cut off years before, flipped it up.

Somewhere near the center of the basement, a single bulb responded, impossibly, and a yellow-gray haze brightened the air. A wave of freezing shock nearly knocked him down. Someone was using this house, someone who paid the electric bills. Mark felt like flattening himself against the wall. He could hear his labored breathing, and a tingle rippled across his face like cold lightning.

The bulb itself was invisible behind the “stockade fence,” in reality a wall of halved logs, shaggy with bark, that ran the entire length of the basement. At intervals, doors had been sawed into the logs. Mark went to the first of the doors. A minute later, he was vomiting up the breakfast he had not eaten.

19

From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 24 June 2003

“So what did he find?” I asked.

Jimbo looked profoundly uncomfortable. I had more or less kidnapped him from the comforts of his living room and driven him downtown to a restaurant that had been hot stuff back in the mid-sixties. The Fireside Lounge had good memories for me, and its steaks were as perfect as any I’d ever eaten in New York. Jimbo had never been there before, and he was unsure of how to respond to its old-fashioned midwestern luxe of dark lighting, red leather booths, and big wooden tables with chairs like thrones. It was a place where you could talk without being overheard, but my plan to get Jimbo loosened up had only half-worked. He was demolishing his steak, which he’d ordered well done and slathered in ketchup, but he still thought he was being disloyal to Mark by talking to me.

“No one’s going to be mad at Mark,” I told Jimbo. “All anybody wants to do is to find out where he is and get him back, if that’s possible.”

“I wish we could get him back,” Jimbo said.

“Don’t you think we can?”

Jimbo pushed a section of overdone meat into a puddle of ketchup.

“I don’t want to rush you,” I said.

He nodded, and the slice of steak disappeared into his gullet. Like most teenage boys, Jimbo could eat like a Roman emperor three or four times a day.

“He told you he went down to the basement on this hidden staircase.”

“The third hidden staircase. They were all over that place. And . . .” He stopped talking and his face turned red.

“And what?”

“Nothing.”

I let it go, temporarily. “What did he find in the basement, Jimbo?”

“It was in the little room, the first one. There were five or six of them, I guess.” Jimbo went inward for a moment, and his forehead wrinkled into creases. He really was a decent boy. “You know what people used to put their stuff in when they went on boats? Those big boxes like suitcases, only they’re not? With padlocks?”

“Steamer trunks,” I said.

“Yeah, a steamer trunk. There was one of those trunks shoved up against a wall. And there was a lock on it, only it was busted open. So he looked inside it. That thing, that trunk, it was full of hair.”

“Hair?”

“Women’s hair, all cut off and stuck together. Blond hair, brown hair, red hair.”

“No wonder he threw up.”

Jimbo acted as though I had not spoken. “Only, he couldn’t figure out what it was at first, because it was clumped together. It looked like some kind of big dead animal. So he reached in and took out a clump. It was stuck together with brown stuff that flaked off when he touched it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“That’s when he puked,” Jimbo said. “When he realized he was holding the hair cut off a bunch of women. It was all stuck together with blood.”

“Good God.”

“The police went there, didn’t they? Why did they leave that shit behind? They must have taken a ton of crap out of that house.”

“Good question,” I said, though I thought I knew the answer. In those days, there was no DNA evidence. Maybe they had bagged some of the hair and done what they could with it. The police had almost certainly broken the lock.

“You know who used to live there, don’t you?” I asked.

Jimbo nodded. “I do now.”

“From going around the neighborhood, knocking on doors.”

“That was my job. I took the outside, Mark had the inside.”

“And you wound up talking to Mr. Hillyard.”

“He’s spooky. He wouldn’t let me come into his house until he had that accident, and then I saw why. Boo-ya! That’s some shit in there, yo.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, having had my own glimpse into Omar Hillyard’s living room. “Let’s go back to Mark.”

“Do I have to do this? You know what that Kalendar guy did, you don’t need me to tell you about it.”

I told him that I had known nothing about all that until shortly before Mark’s disappearance, when Tom Pasmore had filled me in on some of the details.

“They were related, him and Mark. Because his mother had the same name. I found out from Old Man Hillyard! When I told Mark, he couldn’t ask his dad about it since he had hissy fits every time the subject came up. He went on the Internet. And man, was there stuff about Kalendar. These people, they, like, worship serial killers.”

“What did he find on-line about Kalendar?”

“There was a ton of stuff. Then he found a genealogy site put up by a guy in St. Louis, and he clicked on it, and he saw a family tree.”

“He was on it, I suppose.”

“His whole family. That was how he found out his mom’s dad and Joseph Kalendar’s father were brothers. So the two of them, they were cousins. So to Joseph Kalendar, Mark was . . .”

“His first cousin, once removed. Let’s get back to Mark inside the house. I don’t suppose he stopped looking around after he threw up.”

I had already learned from Omar Hillyard that Mark had gone back to the Kalendar house on every one of the days before his disappearance.

“Yeah, he kept looking. He found a lot of weird stuff in the basement, like a big metal table and this, like, chute that came down from the first floor, and all these old bloodstains. But . . .”

Jimbo stabbed the top end of a French fry into the ketchup. His eyes met mine and slid away. About a third of the red-tipped French fry went into his mouth. He looked around, as if aimlessly, at the businessmen devouring steaks and the suburban ladies working on salads at the big polished tables. Across the room at the long bar, an old man in a wrinkled seersucker suit and a guy in a polo shirt were trying not to ogle the barmaid, who had not been born at the time of my first visits to the Fireside Lounge.

“You keep cutting yourself off at the pass,” I said.

The tip of his tongue slipped between his teeth and curled against his upper lip. His eyes went out of focus an instant before they met mine. “Do what?”

“Stop yourself from saying something.”

He stared in the general direction of my chin.

“For Mark’s sake, you should tell me everything you know. That’s why we’re here.”

Jimbo nodded, not very persuasively.

“You said he found a chute and a metal table. The Kalendar websites must have told you that he dismembered some of his victims before putting their bodies into his furnace. He ordered the operating table from a medical supply company.”

“We saw, yeah.”

“Then you started to tell me something else, and you cut yourself off at the pass.”

I watched him considering his options. He flicked a glance at me, and the skin over his cheekbones tightened, and I knew he had cleared an internal hurdle.

“Mark went into all those little rooms. There was an operating room, and another room had three or four hampers that were all empty. He thought they were where he put the women’s clothes and the cops took it all away.”

“The police didn’t search the place nearly as well as Mark did.”

“No, they never found the corridors.” Jimbo chewed the lump of steak in his mouth, swallowed, and took a deep breath. We were about to get closer to the center of what he was hiding from me.

“So he went back upstairs—the normal way. He found the top of the chute in the secret passage between the living room and the dining room. Yo, Kalendar dragged them through the walls and dumped them right onto the table. The first floor was a lot like the other one. From up there, you could take one of the stairs and get everywhere in that house. Mark said before Kalendar killed the women, he tortured them by letting them know he was there, even though they couldn’t see him.” He made a sour face. “In the living room, the opening to the secret corridor was in the coat closet under the regular stairs.” Jimbo hesitated, and now I know exactly why. He had to think about going further.

“A closet,” I said. “Like the one in the bedroom.”

“Yeah. So he looked.”

He was going to tell me, but not until he absolutely had to. I pushed him to the next square. “What did he see—another wooden box, like the one upstairs?”

He blinked. I’d gotten it right.

“What was in it? A diary?” I was looking entirely in the wrong direction.

“No, not a diary,” Jimbo mumbled.

A thought came to me. “Could he open the box up?”

Jimbo nodded. He looked away from me, and his mouth momentarily twitched into something resembling a smile.

“Come on, Jimbo. Stop dancing around. What was in the box? A lot of bones? A skull?”

“Nothing like that.” He was smiling. I was so wide of the mark, it amused him. “When he opened the box, his paper bag was in it. With the photograph album and his hammer and his crowbar. And his dumb little Wonder Bread sandwich.”

On the other side of the dining room, the barmaid burst into silvery peals of laughter. We turned our heads to see the old man, shaking violently in either humor or agitation. At our distance, he looked like a trembling old skeleton in a suit.

Timothy Underhill, if put to the test, could rattle off, in order, the entire hierarchy of military rank from private to commander in chief. Almost any former soldier could do the same, but Tim’s novels had sometimes referred to his experiences in Vietnam, and he had taken pains to get things right. His books also made reference to various police departments here and there, and although every police department in the world acknowledged itself as a paramilitary organization, the meaning of individual rankings varied from place to place. No common standard prevailed.

To take the most immediate case, Tim thought, consider Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus, the grim, authoritative figure at the head of the table around which his audience of six had placed itself. As their little party had proceeded through the station, police officers uniformed and not had visibly deferred to him. Sergeant Pohlhaus was in his early forties, and he wore his handsome blue suit like a supple variety of armor. His biceps filled his sleeves, and his collar met his neck like a tape. Tim supposed that Sergeant Pohlhaus spent a good deal of time at the gym. There were no windows in the room, and the air stank of cigarette smoke. Sergeant Pohlhaus transformed the shabby chamber into a command center.

“Let’s go around the table and make sure we know each other’s names.”

He looked at the couple nearest him on the left side of the table. A well-padded, pink-faced guy sitting next to a nervous blonde jumped as though he had been jabbed with a pin.

“Uh, we’re Flip and Marty Auslander, Shane’s parents,” he said. “Nice to meet you all.”

“Bill Wilk. Trey’s dad.”

“Hello, everybody. I’m Jennie Dell, Dewey’s mother.”

Bill Wilk’s boiled-egg eyes glared out from the close-shaven, bowling-ball head set atop his squat body. Jennie Dell hitched her chair a few more inches away from his.

“I’m Philip Underhill, Mark’s father, and this is my brother, Tim. He’s from out of town.”

“For starters, I don’t think your brother belongs here,” said Wilk, “but that’s the sergeant’s call. This was supposed to be just family members, though.”

“I am a family member,” Tim said.

Bill Wilk scowled at him for a moment, then swung his head on his nonexistent neck to glare at the Auslanders. “One question: which one’s Flip and which one’s Marty?”

The pink face broke into an embarrassed smile. “I’m Flip. Marty’s my wife.”

“You two ought to switch names, in my opinion.”

Pohlhaus slapped the table with his palm. “Mr. Wilk, cease and desist!”

“I lost my son. What more can you do to me?”

The sergeant smiled at him. It was an extremely disconcerting smile, evoking bolts of lightning and screams of pain. “Do you want to find out?”

Wilk seemed to lose an inch or two in height. “Sorry, boss.”

“I want to remind you and everyone else at this table that we are here because of your sons.” The flat blue eyes moved to Tim. “Or nephew, in your case.” Pohlhaus let everyone inhabit a moment of silence that seemed to increase his own gravity. “And what I have to tell you represents our first significant break on this case. I wanted to share it with you before it is made public.”

Even Bill Wilk remained silent. Unconsciously, Jennie Dell took in a deep breath and held it.

“You will be pleased to learn that we have a new eyewitness, a Professor Ruth Bellinger, of Madison, Wisconsin. Professor Bellinger is in the Astronomy-Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin. Three weeks ago, Professor Bellinger was in town visiting her sister, and she happened to be seated on a bench near the fountain in Sherman Park when something caught her attention.”

“She saw him?” Marty Auslander leaned past her husband to peer at Pohlhaus. “She saw the guy?”

“Three weeks ago, the guy hadn’t even started yet,” said Bill Wilk.

“This will go faster if you let me proceed without further interruption,” said Pohlhaus. “Any questions you might have, ask them when I’m done talking.”

Marty Auslander wilted back into her chair.

Pohlhaus swept his gaze around the table, including everyone. “What caught Professor Bellinger’s attention was a conversation between a teenage boy and an adult male, probably in his late thirties. According to the professor, he was an unusually large man, probably six-four or six-five, and solidly built, running to something like two hundred and thirty, two hundred and fifty pounds, black hair. For personal reasons, the professor is very sensitive to the presence of sexual predators. It seemed to her that something of that sort was going on here. The man seemed a little too ingratiating. He kept, in the professor’s words, ‘moving in on the boy,’ and she thought the boy was resisting without wanting to appear rude.

“Professor Bellinger was beginning to wonder if her civic duty—again, I am quoting her—obliged her to interfere when an odd thing happened. The adult male visibly scanned the immediate area. The professor thought he was ascertaining if his actions might be observed. She said that he looked ‘feral.’ Now comes the part we really like. In the same second, Professor Bellinger stood up and the man spotted her. When she took a step forward, the man said something to the boy and walked off at a rapid rate.”

“She saw his face,” Flip said.

“So did the boy,” said Marty.

“Three weeks ago?” bellowed Bill Wilk. “Why are we just hearing about this now?”

“Wait your turn, Mr. Wilk.” Pohlhaus froze him with a stare. “Professor Bellinger asked the boy if he knew the name of the man who had been talking to him. All he knew was that his first name was Ronnie, the boy said, and he had upgraded his sound system and wanted to get rid of his old equipment, along with a lot of CDs he didn’t play anymore. His first question to the boy had been about the kind of music he liked, and after he heard the answer, he said, ‘Great! My car’s right over there, and my place is only five minutes away.’ Ronnie seemed to want to give away all that stuff a little too much, the kid told her, and he’d been trying to figure out a way to get away from the guy when Ronnie spotted her getting off her bench.”

“Lucky boy,” said Flip Auslander.

“Have you talked to this boy?” his wife asked.

“I’d love to talk to him, but we don’t know where he lives, and he never told Professor Bellinger his name.”

“Why did it take so long for her to come forward?” Philip asked.

“Astronomer-physicists don’t pay much attention to what’s on the news,” Pohlhaus said. “And the Madison paper didn’t give much space to the Sherman Park story. Professor Bellinger became aware of our situation here two days ago, and she called us instantly. The next day, she drove here from Madison. Most of yesterday afternoon, she spent working with our sketch artist. I gather that astronomers are unusually observant, on the whole. The professor remembered many, many more details than the conventional witness.”

Bill Wilk started to stay something, but Pohlhaus shushed him and went around the table to the door. He leaned out and said, “Stafford, we’re ready in here.”

When he turned around, he was holding a small stack of papers. He handed two of them to Philip Underhill, then went to the other side of the table to give papers to the Auslanders, Bill Wilk, and Jennie Dell. He still had two or three pages in his hand when he returned to the head of the table.

“So we are assuming that this is a fairly accurate portrait of Ronnie.” Like the rest of them, Pohlhaus stared down at the picture. “We think Ronnie is a bad, bad man. We also think that he’s been at work here at least five years.”

The man whose face had been drawn by the sketch artist might have been one of those actors like Murray Hamilton or Tim Matheson, actors who appear in one film or television program after another, and whose names you can never remember and probably never knew. His almost-handsome features suggested a salesman’s instantaneous affability. That his eyes may have been a fraction of an inch too close together and his nose a millimeter too short only added to his approachability. His minor flaws made him look friendlier. He probably had some kind of job that put him in contact with people. He was the guy standing next to you at the bar who says, “So a rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar.” This man would have little trouble talking gullible teenage boys into his car.

“What do you mean, at least five years?” said Bill Wilk.

“Yes, what makes you say that?” asked Philip.

“When Professor Bellinger pushed our time frame backward, I started to look at other jurisdictions, just to see what turned up. Here’s what I found.”

He pulled out the sheet at the bottom of his little stack of papers. It was a typed list.

“August 1998. James Thorn, a sixteen-year-old boy reported missing in Auburn.” Auburn was a little town just south of Millhaven. “Thorn was a good student who until his disappearance had never so much as stayed out all night.”

He moved his finger down the list. “Another sixteen-year-old boy, Luther Hardcastle, living with his grandparents in Footeville.” This was an old farming community, now a small town surrounded by suburbs, located about five minutes west of Millhaven. “He goes missing in July of 1999 and is never seen again. According to his grandmother, Luther was mildly retarded and very obedient.” He looked up. “Here’s the interesting part. The last person reported to have seen Luther Hardcastle was a friend of his, Robert Whittle, who told an officer in Footeville that he ran into Luther on Main Street that afternoon and invited him to listen to some CDs at his house. Luther was a big Billy Joel fan. He told Whittle he’d come by later, but first he was going to Ronnie’s house because Ronnie was going to give him a lot of Billy Joel CDs. From the way he said it, Whittle assumed that Ronnie was a friend of Luther’s grandparents, or at least someone known to them.”

“Oh, my God,” said Jennie Dell.

“That happened in 1999, and you didn’t know about it until today?” Flip Auslander seemed torn between rage and incredulity.

“You’d be amazed by how little communication goes on between departments in different jurisdictions. Anyhow, Luther Hardcastle’s story put a lot of things in a different light. Joseph Lilly, for example. He was a seventeen-year-old Laurel Heights boy who disappeared in June of 2000. Then there is Barry Amato, fourteen, disappeared from South Millhaven in July 2001. So we have this pattern of one a year, always in the summer months, when the boys are on vacation and more likely to be outside at night. In 2002, the ante is upped a little. Last year, we had two teenage boys disappear from the Lake Park region, Scott Lebow and Justin Brothers, seventeen years old. Their parents thought that they ran away together, since the Lebow boy had just come out to his mother, and Justin’s parents had known he was gay since he went through puberty. Both sets of parents tried to break up the friendship. We thought the boys ran off together, too, but now I believe we must reconsider.”

“The creep got ’em,” said Bill Wilk.

“Here’s the situation as I see it,” Pohlhaus said. “Ronnie has been living in or around this city for years. He has a decent job, and he owns his own house. He is single. He likes to consider himself heterosexual. This man is neat, orderly, and a considerate neighbor. Mainly, he keeps to himself. His neighbors have never been inside his house. Five years ago, something in him snapped, and he could no longer resist the very, very powerful temptation to act on his fantasies. James Thorn fell for his CDs story and wound up buried in a secret location, probably somewhere on Ronnie’s property.

“Killing Thorn kept him satisfied for a year, after which time Luther Hardcastle fell into his lap. Luther’s probably buried next to or on top of the Thorn boy. I want you to observe that Ronnie went to different parts of the Millhaven area to select his victims, and that he continued to do so until this summer. He keeps to the pattern of one murder a year. In the summer of 2000, he goes hunting again and captures Joseph Lilly. Another body in the backyard, or under his basement floor. In 2001, another body. In 2002, he strikes it rich and gets two victims. His appetite is getting stronger. This year, he bides his time until school gets out, but then loses control completely. He kills four boys in the space of about ten days. My point is, he’s getting more and more reckless. Three weeks ago, he approached a boy in broad daylight, and the only thing that stopped him was that our professor scared him off. He laid low for a little while. Then he went into this frenzy.”

Sergeant Pohlhaus’s words would have been unbearable but for the almost violently impassive authority with which he delivered them. No one at the table moved.

“This city needs a curfew,” Philip said. His voice sounded as if it were leaking through from the other side of a heavy internal door.

“A curfew is going to be set in place within the next couple of days. Persons sixteen years of age and younger will be required by law to be off the streets by ten P.M. We’ll see how effective it is.”

“But what are you going to do?” asked Marty Auslander. “Wait around hoping you’ll catch him before he murders another boy?”

The remainder of the meeting degenerated into a contest of name-calling against stonewalling. As the Underhills left the building, Philip looked so drained and weary that Tim asked if he could drive him home.

“You got it,” Philip said, and tossed him the keys.

Bill Wilk, Jennie Dell, and the Auslanders separated from the brothers and from one another before they reached the sidewalk. All parties went toward their cars without a parting word or a gesture of farewell.

From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 25 June 2003

Six o’clock. Without anything to do (maybe without the energy to think of something to do), I sit here on the ugly green sofa of my childhood, scribbling in this journal while pretending not to hear the sounds coming from upstairs. Philip is weeping. Ten minutes ago, he was sobbing, but now he has settled into a soft, steady weep, and I hear sighs instead of groans. I should probably be glad he can cry. Haven’t I been waiting for him to show some genuine emotion?

Now the two of us, along with everyone else in that room, have a name and a face to go with our fears and our grief. Ronnie, what an innocuous-looking fiend. I wonder what Joseph Kalendar looked like. I could Google him on my nephew’s computer, but for some reason I feel reluctant to break into Mark’s privacy like that. Of course the police felt no such compunction, and they searched his hard disk and his e-mail for clues to what might have happened to him. Since Philip says they returned it without comment, I assume they found nothing relevant.

Which means they ignored the e-mails Mark sent me. If this adventure of his made him feel as though he were inside one of my books, it couldn’t be a conventional mystery about a murderer and an empty house. It had to be something about the house itself, and something that was happening to him there. Something he was undergoing. This “something” both frightened and excited him in a way mere sleuthing could never do. What Jimbo tells me confirms this. Mark’s paper bag traveled from the second floor of Kalendar’s house to the ground floor through a series of secret corridors between the walls. Earlier, the photo album had traveled from the kitchen to a space hidden behind a panel in an upstairs closet. I don’t see how you can avoid the conclusion that someone else was in the house with him.

Gardens at

Impossible

Distances

PART FIVE

20

In the heat beneath the stairs, sweat drizzled from his hairline to his eyebrows. For a moment his vision blurred. Through a blanket of humidity, an indistinct hand groped forward in shadows toward a fuzzy shape that two seconds before had been a paper bag. Mark wiped his eyes. The fuzzy shape once again became that of a bag. Even before his fingers closed around its top, he knew it was the bag he had left in the closet upstairs.

He lifted it, and the hammer and the crowbar clunked together. Mark thumped the bag onto the floor. His stomach felt taut, and his eyes hurt. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t be here.” He unrolled the top and thrust his hand deep inside. The crowbar fell against his wrist, and the hammer tilted into the side of the bag. Here was the album’s quilted plastic binding, taking up most of the interior. Behind the album, his sandwich wilted in its smooth container.

Mark’s mouth was dry. The little space behind the closet had shrunk around him, crushing him down. Awkwardly, he slid open the panel leading into the closet, trained the light on the inner side of the door, worked the latch, and pushed his way outside. He was sweating furiously.

At the bottom of the staircase, Mark took everything out of the bag and arranged its contents in front of him. The air was a mild gray, brightened by ambient window light to a dusty glow that illuminated the grime on his hands and the dark, embedded layer of grit on the cover of the album.

“How did you . . .”

Mark glanced to both sides, then up the length of the staircase.

Smoky, insubstantial walls: he felt all at once that altogether another world lay on the other side of these vaguenesses, and if he but pushed through the veils of gauze, he could reach that new and infinitely more desirable realm.

“Hello!”

Only silence answered.

“Is anyone here?”

No voice, no footfalls responded.

“I know you’re here,” he called in a carrying voice. “Show yourself!”

His heart thudded. While he was in the basement, someone had slipped out of hiding—this house offered a great many hiding places—gone to the master bedroom, picked up the laden bag, and with it moved through the house on either the visible staircase or a hidden one to the ground floor, where this someone worked the catch on the wooden safe, deposited in it the paper bag, closed the box back up, and thereafter disappeared back into the secret parts of the house. Yesterday, the same person had taken the photo album back to the upstairs closet.

It came to him that everything about the house had changed—changed without transition—and he had only just now registered the difference, which was enormous.

The monstrous snout-being that wished to frighten him away was not interested in playing games. That creature wanted to scare him off, so that it could rejoice in the poisoned atmosphere that it had created. Someone else, someone quick and stealthy as a panther, had shifted the bag from one closet to another. During every moment of Mark’s progress through the house’s hidden passages, this being had been aware of his exact location. Mark might as well have been blowing a bugle as he worked his way through the house.

Because most of what he knew about this silent someone else was simply that it was present in the house, he thought of it as “the Presence.” Of course, Mark reminded himself, that the bag and its contents had been moved was all the proof he had of the Presence’s existence. That seemed proof enough. The Presence had shifted Mark’s things, believing that he would find them in their new hiding place, which meant oho o me-o my-o that it wanted him to know he wasn’t alone.

The chill that had moved across his skin receded, and he became aware of the heat of his T-shirt sticking to his skin. Dust swirled in the dim light from the window. The sheets draped over the chairs and the sofa seemed to stir. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again, they hung still as shrouds. A white blur moved across the periphery of his vision. When he turned to look at it, it was gone.

Not long before dusk, the boys sat huddled together on the bench nearest the Sherman Park fountain, conversing intently under the eye of a police officer named Quentin Jester. Patrolman Jester strained to overhear the boys’ conversation. The few words he caught were not helpful, nor did they alleviate his boredom, which had returned to him after banishment by a brief and unsettling incident. Along with four strategically placed policemen, plus a homeless man pushing a grocery cart full of empty bottles down a path, the boys were alone in the park.

What Patrolman Jester failed to mention in his report, or at any other opportunity (except for that presented by his fellow officer and academy classmate Louis Easley at the House of Ko-Reck-Shun), was that shortly before the homeless man entered the scene from the east, and first one boy, the red-haired one, then the other, Mark Underhill, entered from the north, a fourth stranger had excited his professional attention not only by his great size and unusual clothing but for another matter as well, one more difficult to put into words. “He looked like back in the day, he could have played some college ball,” Jester said. “One thing about this dude, he had some serious size on him. But he never played no ball. He never played anything. This guy never played, period, unless it was with a couple of cut-off heads. I got this feeling, like ‘We got trouble here,’ okay?”

Patrolman Jester explained that he had at no point seen the man’s face. And although he had spent the previous hour and a half monitoring the movements of the few people who entered and left his assigned area of Sherman Park, Jester had failed to observe this gigantic man’s appearance until, without any of the usual signals of arrival, the dude had simply come into being in front of him, straight out of nowhere, his back turned to the startled officer. Jester had been following the progress across the grass of a particularly fat and lively squirrel, a squirrel undaunted by the heat that had enervated most of his kind, and upon swinging his gaze back to the broad path and its empty benches, he’d discovered the presence of this massive character, decked out in a long black coat that dropped well past his knees. Huge legs, planted far apart; heavy black boots; massive head held high; and arms folded in front of him. He might have been carved out of half a ton of black marble.

“How could a water buffalo like that sneak up on you?” asked Patrolman Easley.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Jester told his friend. “All I knew was, this man is there, and he is my problem. Because you know he is a problem.”

“You and me, we haven’t been out of the academy long enough to be able to smell the bad guys.”

“You’d know what I’m talking about if you were there. He’s one bad mother, is what I’m saying, and there he is in front of me, and I have to deal with him.”

Louis Easley raised both his eyebrows and his beer glass, but he did not drink. “So this is our man? Mr. Sherman Park himself, in person?”

“That’s what was going through my mind. I move up on him so I can at least get a look at his face. This rumbling noise is coming toward me from the boulevard entrance, and I look that way, and this red-haired kid is pumping along on a skateboard. When I look back, the big dude is gone. Gone, man. Like he fell straight down through a trap door.”

“You, you’re some kind of police officer,” Easley told him.

“You wouldn’t be laughing, you saw him, too,” Jester said.

A few seconds after Jimbo rolled to the bench and jumped off his board, the policeman who’d been standing on the other side of the walkway gave him a funny look and said, “Buddy, while you were coming up this path, did you happen to notice a man standing right over here in this position?”

“I didn’t see anyone but you,” Jimbo said.

“You had a good view of this area.”

“I guess.”

“Where was I standing when you first saw me?”

“Over there.” Jimbo pointed to a spot on the edge of the walkway four feet south of the fountain. It was just about where another officer had shown him and Mark the photograph of Shane Auslander.

“And when I was over there, no one was over here?”

“Not until you got here.”

“Thank you,” said Officer Jester, retreating.

These guys are losing their minds,Jimbo said to himself.

When he first caught sight of Mark moving empty-handed from the bright sun of Sherman Boulevard into the wavering shade cast by tall lindens on the wide flags of the walkway, he felt a twinge of loss. This time, he had brought his skateboard and Mark had not, which was, he found, worse than the recognition that both of them had left their boards at home. It made him for a moment feel as though Mark had set off on a journey that left him waving from the dock. Mark drew closer, and the urgent expression on his face reminded Jimbo that he, too, had something incredible to announce, although he was not so sure he actually wanted to tell Mark what Mr. Hillyard had revealed to him.

Mark suffered from no such scruple. His eyes blazing, he could barely restrain himself from running. Jimbo saw him take in the skateboard and on the spot dismiss it as an irrelevance. The swift, deepening ache this brought Jimbo almost immediately dwindled in the intensity of Mark’s eager slide down onto the bench and the swooping tilt of his shieldlike face toward Jimbo’s. He was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans, and his face had a scrubbed, gleaming look. He smelled faintly of soap.

“You just take a shower?”

“You wouldn’t believe how dirty I got,” Mark said. He was exulting. “The bottom of the bathtub was all black.”

“I guess you found something.”

Mark’s grin tightened, and his eyes narrowed. Jimbo could not decipher these signals. It looked to him as though what Mark had found was either unspeakably bad or outrageously good.

“How about you?”

“I’ve got some stuff, yeah, but you go first.”

Mark straightened up on the park bench, placed a hand over his mouth, and looked over his shoulder at Patrolman Jester. Patrolman Jester looked back at him, poker-faced. “Well, that’s a pretty amazing place. Whoever lived there last probably. . . . Are you ready for this?”

“I know something about it already. Whoever lived there probably what?”

Another backward glance at Quentin Jester, who went to visible pains to look elsewhere. “Probably murdered a lot of people.”

Mark told Jimbo about the hidden corridors, and his exploration of the basement, his discovery of the trunk, and the stains soaked into the concrete floor. “That’s why nobody can stand to look at the place. Something terrible really did happen in there. Maybe he built that big wooden bed so he could torture them before he took them downstairs.”

“You couldn’t fit a grown-up woman into those straps,” Jimbo said, knowing more than he was willing to say. He could not understand why Mark seemed to be in such a bubbly mood.

“If they were small, you could.” His all but hidden internal mirth, which would have been visible only to Jimbo and perhaps his father, flickered for a moment into view. “And how about you, Sherlock. What’s this information you said you had?”

Jimbo felt as though he had been pushed to the end of a diving board and ordered to jump. “Most of the people on Michigan Street don’t have a clue about the place. All they know is, some people in the neighborhood got together to keep it from looking like a slum, and they mow the grass on the sides and in front every two weeks. They have a kind of a list, and all these guys take turns. A couple of women told me their husbands hate the place. They hope it’ll burn down one night. The Rochenkos were both home. That was one of the only two places where I got asked why I wanted to know about the house.”

“Where was the other one? Ah. I bet I know. So what did you say?”

Jimbo made a face. “I said I was thinking up a topic for a research paper I have to do next year. The Rochenkos told me to think about global warming. Mrs. Rochenko said she had a bad feeling about 3323, and I shouldn’t even look at it if I didn’t have to.”

“I bet they don’t look at it even when they’re mowing the lawn.” Mark stared at Jimbo, and Jimbo braced himself. “The other guy to ask why you were so curious was Old Man Hillyard, right?”

Jimbo nodded. “Old Man Hillyard saw us sneaking around the back yesterday, and he saw you going there this morning.”

Alarm bloomed in Mark’s eyes. “He’s not going to tell anybody, is he?”

“No, he’s not like that. Old Man Hillyard is different from the way we always thought.” Jimbo paused. “He’s pretty off the wall.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Same thing. Research project.”

“Did he believe you?”

“He asked me if I thought he was an idiot. He said, even if high schools assigned research papers in summer, I was the kind of kid who’d put off doing it until the last week of August.”

Mark laughed. After a moment Jimbo laughed, too.

“Okay, okay. So I told him that we were just really interested in the place, that’s all. And he said . . .”

“He said . . . ?”

“He said it was interesting that we were interested.”

Mark lifted his chin and opened his mouth just about wide enough to sip the air.

“It was especially interesting that you were interested in it.”

Mark’s head tilted, and his eyebrows went up. Jimbo had to say it now. It was either that or make up some lie.

“I hope you’re going to explain that to me.”

“Naturally, I asked him what he meant.” Jimbo paused again, searching for words.

Mark leaned forward. “Well?”

Jimbo inhaled. “The first part, you already know about. The man who lived in that house was a murderer.”

“No shit.”

“And the second part . . . is that he was probably related to your mom. Because they had the same last name. Before your mom married your dad.” Puzzled by the growing recognition visible in his friend’s face, Jimbo said, “Calendar? Like the months and the days, a calendar?”

“Kalendar,” Mark said. He spelled it out for Jimbo. “You saw it at the funeral home, remember?”

“I guess I didn’t really notice. But Old Man Hillyard said the murderer’s name was Joseph Kalendar, and he didn’t even know it was your mom’s maiden name until he went to your house and saw it on those cards. With the sunset and the Lord’s Prayer?”

“And?”

“And he was surprised, because Kalendar was such a bad guy. He killed all those women, and he murdered his own son. Old Man Hillyard knew these people!”

“Wow,” Mark said.

“I thought you were going to be upset. But you almost look like you’re happy to hear about Kalendar.”

“Of course I’m happy. You just told me what I needed to know. The guy’s name, and what he did. He and Mom were related. Maybe he was her brother!”

He gave Jimbo a look of pure wildness, his eyes bulging in their sockets. “Joseph Kalendar is the Dark Man. And he’s the reason my mom killed herself.”

“The Dark Man?”

“The man whose back is always turned. He’s the guy I saw at the top of Michigan Street.”

“What? You think he’s a ghost?”

Mark shook his head. “I think he’s more like what some people call a ghost.” He thought for a moment. “What happened to Joseph Kalendar?”

“He was sent to a mental hospital, and another inmate killed him.”

“I bet we can find out all about him on the Internet.”

Jimbo nodded, then thought of something else. “What do you mean, what some people call a ghost?”

Mark laughed and shook his head. “I mean, like—something left behind. Something real enough so sometimes you can see it.”

“Ican’t see it,” Jimbo said. “I mean, I couldn’t. That day in your kitchen, I didn’t see anyone standing with his back to the door.”

“You saw him two nights earlier, and you were so scared you fainted. He was what was left behind of Joseph Kalendar. Maybe I see him more often than you do because I’m related to him. And maybe this Sherman Park Killer is stirring him up.”

“Stuff like that doesn’t happen. Parts of people aren’t left behind. The only person who sees dead people is Haley Joely Osmond, or whatever his name is.”

“Joel Haley Osmond,” Mark said, thinking that did not sound quite right, either. “Only, you’re wrong. A lot of people see dead people—the part left behind. Don’t you think? A friend of yours dies, and one day you’re walking down the street and you look in a window and just for a second you see him in there. The next day, maybe you see him getting on a bus, or walking across a bridge. That’s the part of him that’s left behind.”

“Yeah, left behind in you.”

“In you, right. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“But you never heard of this guy.”

“My mother knew all about him. She must have worried about him, she must have been afraid of him. This guy had to be a big deal in my mother’s life! Don’t you think some of that could have passed into me?”

“You’re crazy,” Jimbo said.

“No, I’m not. Parents pass things on. Things they have no idea they’re passing on, those things especially they pass on to their children.”

As if to put an end to this conversation, Mark stood up and glanced around. A few adults were hurrying homeward through the park. Patrolman Jester stared thoughtfully at an empty place on the other side of the walkway. Together, the boys noticed that the air had begun to darken.

Jimbo stood up, too, looking a bit belligerent. “That doesn’t explain how you can see Joseph Kalendar, who’s been dead for twenty-five years!”

Mark and Jimbo walked, their pace slower than usual, down the path to Sherman Boulevard.

“I don’t think I actually saw Joseph Kalendar. I think I saw the Dark Man, the part that’s left of Joseph Kalendar. Like I said before, maybe the Sherman Park Killer woke him up, and the only person he’s visible to is me.”

“Well, maybe the Dark Man is the Sherman Park Killer,” Jimbo said, with the air of one throwing out a random speculation.

“I think it’s the other way around, that the Sherman Park Killer is the Dark Man.”

“What’s the difference?”

“There’s a real killer out there, that’s the difference. The Dark Man can’t take people—he doesn’t even have a face. The Sherman Park guy can kill you.”

They strolled across Sherman Boulevard, as usual paying no attention to the traffic lights.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if other people saw the Dark Man here and there, you know, in little flashes. Things are getting a little weird in this part of town.”

“You’re getting a little weird,” Jimbo said. “It’s like finding out about this Kalendar, this psycho, cheered you up!” He glanced at Mark’s face. “It did, didn’t it? You’re all, like, electrified about something.”

“Well,” Mark said.

“A trunk full of hair and a couple of secret passages wouldn’t do this to you.”

“Well,” Mark said again, and told Jimbo about finding the paper bag in the downstairs closet after leaving it upstairs. “Don’t you see what happened?”

Jimbo honestly had no idea.

“Somebody moved my bag.” Now Mark’s mirth shone from his eyes.

“Kalendar? The Dark Man?”

Mark shook his head. “This person is playing with me, Jimbo. She’s saying, I’m here, why can’t you see me? ”

“It’s a she?”

“I think it’s that girl, the one I sorta saw through the window that morning. Even back then, I had the feeling she was deliberately showing herself. And this morning, I thought I saw—”

Jimbo stopped moving, then shook his head and resumed walking along the west side of Sherman Boulevard toward West Burleigh Street.

“You just remembered something,” Mark said.

“No, it wasn’t anything.”

Mark continued to stare at him.

“When we were in the house together? I thought something moved. I saw this movement, this blur.”

“No kidding,” Mark said. “There you are. See?”

“Not really.”

“Everything’s different in there now. Everything feels different.”

Jimbo sighed. “What do you want me to do tomorrow?”

“See if Old Man Hillyard knows anything about a girl or a young woman.”

“A lot of women died there, did you forget that?”

“Ask anyhow.”

“Kalendar didn’t have any daughters.”

“Just ask, okay?”

“If you promise to tell me what happens if she’s really there and you meet her.”

“Let’s go to your house.”

“Now what do you want to do?”

“Now,” Mark said, “we are going to Google Joseph Kalendar.”

Patrolman Quentin Jester moved to the far side of an immense clump of dying azaleas growing a few feet from the right side of the walkway. He had already walked once around the periphery of the azaleas, and he felt both discouraged and irritated with himself. It was too hot for a man to spend his working day standing out in the full glare of the sun, waiting for a villain who was never going to show his face. In all that heat and glare, even a trained officer could lose his bearings. Patrolman Jester had let his senses persuade him that he had seen that very same massive, black-haired character dressed in the heavy coat and boots following along behind the red-haired kid and his friend. His professional instincts had come into play, and he’d set off down the big flagstones in pursuit of the mystery man; whereupon the said mystery man peeled off the walkway and stepped behind the long bunch of azaleas. Whereupon, for the second time that day, said mystery man upped and vanished from human view, “like,” as Patrolman Jester’s grandfather used to say, “the unclean spirit at sparrow fart and cockerel’s cry.” Quentin Jester might speak of this enigma to his friend Louis Easley after a couple of beers at the House of Ko-Reck-Shun, but he was never going to put it in a report.

“Yo, ever see one like that before?”

“One what?

“One of those.” Jimbo pointed back across Sherman Boulevard, where eight or nine cars lined up at parking meters stood baking in the sun. Near the center of the row was a red Chevrolet pickup truck, which Mark supposed was the subject of Jimbo’s question.

“Yes, odd as it may seem, I have seen a red pickup before.”

Jimbo was shaking his head vehemently and grinning. He was in a good mood, Mark thought, because he had been let off the hook in regard to Joseph Kalendar’s house.

“Okay, it’s shiny,” he said. “In fact, it’s really shiny. It’s the cleanest, brightest pickup I’ve ever seen. I’d eat a fried egg off its hood.”

“Can’t you see?” Jimbo asked. “It’s the only pickup in the world with . . . with . . .”

“Oh,” Mark said, having seen. “Smoked windows.”

“Pimpwindows, man. With windows like that, I bet you can hardly see a thing.”

“What kind of guy owns that truck?”

“A rich guy,” Jimbo said. “That thing never leaves the garage. It’s like a toy to the guy who owns it.”

The boys were walking slowly along Sherman Boulevard, watching the truck across the street as they drew parallel to it. “It’s some rich kid,” Mark said. “Some twenty-year-old guy who lives in his parents’ gigantic house on Eastern Shore Drive and who will never, for as long as he lives, ever have to get his hands dirty or work outside and get sweaty.”

“Unlike us,” Jimbo said. “The sons of the soil.”

Both of them burst into laughter. When they had gone past the pickup truck, what had been a pleasant diversion ceased to exist, and they forgot all about it.

They reached the front of the Sherman Diner, and Jimbo stopped walking and looked in through its long window.

“I’ll catch up with you later, okay? I kind of arranged to meet someone here for a Coke or something.”

“I don’t believe you,” Mark said, then remembered Jimbo suggesting that they drop in at the diner the day before. “Who is it?”

“Lee Arlington,” Jimbo said, too quickly.

Lee Arlington was an extremely pretty girl in their class. She was reported to be prone to moods, and she wrote poetry in a big journal she carried everywhere with her in her backpack.

“Come on in, too,” Jimbo said. “She’s with Chloe Manners, and Chloe always liked you.”

Mark wavered. He wanted to go into the diner and see what the girls were talking about and what was on their minds, but he also wanted to see if he could find a full-frontal picture of Joseph Kalendar’s face, as well as the details of his crimes.

“You go, have a good time,” he said. “I want to get some info on this psycho cousin of mine. Come over when you’re through here.”

“Half an hour,” Jimbo said. “I’ll be there.”

At the end of the block, Mark remembered the red pickup and glanced back to get another look at it. Jimbo was right: guys who rode around in pickups generally didn’t go for tinted windows. Back down the street, a little sky-blue Datsun was reversing into the empty space where the pickup had been. Too bad, he thought, but no major loss—he just wished he could have gotten a glimpse of the lucky son-of-a-bitch kid who owned that truck. Mark swung his head around to look forward again, and bright, gleaming red flashed in the periphery of his vision. He looked to his left and discovered that while he’d been strategizing with Jimbo, the red pickup had done a U-turn and come far enough down his side of the street to arrive at a point immediately behind him. He waited for it to move past him, but it did not.

Curious, he looked over his shoulder again. The dark gray-green panel of the pickup’s windshield reflected gold sunlight straight into his eyes. Blinking, Mark shaded his eyes with one hand. All he could see were the windshield and the windows; whatever was inside the cab was invisible. The truck still did not move past him, but kept inching along at exactly his pace.

Mark wished he had gone into the Sherman Diner with Jimbo.

Then he told himself not to worry. He was being silly. The guy hidden behind the slick windshield was a kid from Eastern Shore Drive who had managed to get lost on the decidedly ungridlike streets of the former Pigtown. Getting lost in the Sherman Park area wasn’t difficult: Uncle Tim, who had grown up here, had told him that he’d had trouble finding Superior Street on his first day back. The pickup’s driver was going to roll down the passenger window and ask for directions. Mark turned around and began walking backward, waiting to be questioned.

The pickup simply trundled along at two, three miles an hour, hanging back at the unvarying distance of eight or nine feet. Seen close up, the vehicle looked amazingly clean and well polished. The curves of the hood and the fenders appeared almost molten. Along the side and the door panel, the red seemed lacquered in layer after layer, so that for all the brilliance of its surface Mark could look down and down, deeper and deeper, as if into a red pool. Completely free of dirt and pebbles, the tires shone a clear, liquid black. Mark had the feeling that this truck had never been driven in the rain, that it had never seen mud or snow, had never been entrusted to a valet or a public parking lot. It was like someone’s pet cougar that, after having been pampered and brushed every day of its life, was now at last permitted to explore the outer world. It seemed to Mark like a living thing—a large, dangerous living thing, a real entity.

He was letting himself get spooked. Those tinted windows were doing it to him, he knew. If he were able to see the driver, everything about the situation would feel different.

Mark turned his back on the pickup and decided to act as though nothing unusual was going on. In a little while, the truck would drive past him. It had to. And if it did not, he would lose it when he turned onto West Auer, because the red pickup would have no reason to follow him when he left Sherman Boulevard. He moved along the pavement, wondering if anyone in the vicinity thought it was strange that a vehicle should follow along behind a teenage boy, keeping pace as he proceeded down the street. In fact, that was exactly the sort of thing the Sherman Park Killer might do.

The corner of West Auer lay fifteen yards ahead. Mark wanted to look back over his shoulder, but he thought it best to ignore the pickup. In a second, in a couple of seconds, it would pick up speed and move off down Sherman. He quickened his pace, not by much, and the truck clung to him like a shark to its pilot fish. Mark moved along a little faster, but he was still just walking, not jogging or running. He was moving a little faster than usual, that was all. He thought someone watching him would get no special impression of haste.

Ten feet from the corner of West Auer, the pickup moved ahead, advancing into Mark’s field of vision, and pulled up level with him. He flicked a glance at it and kept moving. This was getting scary, but he forced himself to keep his pace steady. Out of the side of his eye he checked to see if the passenger window was being lowered. It was not, which helped. Maybe the driver was just trying to frighten him—that almost made sense, if the driver were a rich, bored twenty-year-old from Eastern Shore Drive or Old Point Harbor. Someone like that would get a kick out of throwing a scare into a high school kid from Pigtown.

Pigtown . . . that was a joke, right? Who could take a place seriously if it had a name like Pigtown?

The pickup moved along at exactly his speed. The window did not roll down, but Mark was certain that the driver was looking at him. He could practically feel the driver’s gaze on his body. Then he thought he could feel it. His stomach turned cold.

He came to Auer and executed a neat, military right-face, hoping to make his getaway before the guy in the pickup realized he was gone. To his dismay, he instantly heard the sound of tires turning in behind him. Mark glanced sideways and saw the hood of the pickup gliding alongside him. When the cab came into view, the passenger window was winding down. No, no, he said to himself, I really don’t think I want to have a conversation with you. Heart pounding, Mark burst into a sprint, thinking that he would run between the houses and make it home through the alley.

The pickup shot ahead and squealed to a halt a little way down the block. The passenger door cracked open. Mark stopped running, unsure of what to do. The driver was not going to come running after him, that was obvious: he wanted to sit behind the wheel and say something to Mark. He had something on his mind, and he wanted to share it. Mark did not want to hear whatever the man had to say. He took a step backward.

The passenger door swung completely open, revealing the dark interior of the pickup’s cab and the huddled, massive shape behind the wheel. It was like looking into the back of a cave. The driver was a big, big man, wrapped in a coat that fell around him like a blanket or an opera cape. A squashy, wide-brimmed hat covered his head. He looked mountainous. A big hand fumbled out of the folds of cloth and waved Mark forward.

“No need to be frightened,” said a low, soft voice. “Aren’t you Mark Underhill? I realize this looks a little funny, but I want to pass on a message to your father. It’s about your mother.”

“Talk to my father yourself,” Mark said. The man behind the wheel seemed shapeless and without a face—a huge pile of flesh equipped with a hand and a soft voice.

“I’m afraid I don’t know him. Come a little closer, will you?”

Somewhere, a door slammed. The shapeless man behind the wheel leaned forward and gestured. Mark looked in the direction of the sound and saw, stepping out onto a porch one house up, the University of Michigan football alum who had called him and Jimbo “youngbloods.” The pickup had swerved into the curb directly in front of this man’s house.

“Pardon me,” the man shouted, “but could anybody use a little help down there?”

Before Mark could answer, the man slouched behind the wheel had thrust out his arm, yanked his door shut, and spun the gleaming pickup backward into the middle of West Auer. In an instant, the pickup was speeding toward the next intersection; a second later, it skittered around the corner and was gone.

“Holy shit, what was that?” the man said. “Are you okay?”

“That guy said he wanted to tell me something about my mother.”

“No shit.” The man stared at him for a second. “He knew your name?”

“Yes.”

The man shook his head. “I didn’t get his license number. Did you?”

“No,” Mark said.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” the man said. “But you should probably stay away from red pickup trucks for a while. I’ll call the police, tell them what I saw. Just in case.”

Still vibrating, Mark went home to look up Joseph Kalendar on the Internet.

This is how the Sherman Park murders, which were more numerous than even Sergeant Pohlhaus had suspected, were solved. After a wretched lunch with his brother, Timothy Underhill decided to drive around to see Tom Pasmore before returning to his room at the Pforzheimer. Tom welcomed him warmly, poured out a measure of whiskey, and led him to his beautiful old leather sofas and the shelves of sound equipment. For old times’ sake, he put on a CD of Glenroy Breakstone’s greatest record, Blue Rose.

Tom asked, “Have the police come up with anything new concerning your nephew’s disappearance?”

“No,” Tim said. “But today I discovered that he spent a lot of time fooling around in Joseph Kalendar’s old house.”

“Do you think that might be relevant?”

“I’m sure it is,” Tim said. “Sergeant Pohlhaus said he’d look into it, but I had the impression he was just humoring me.”

“He must like you,” Tom said. “Sergeant Pohlhaus doesn’t have a reputation for humoring people. It might be interesting to learn who owns that house. Who does, do you know?”

“I don’t think anyone owns it.”

“Oh, somebody does, you can count on that. Why don’t I go upstairs and snoop around on my computer? It’s 3323 North Michigan Street, isn’t it?”

Tim nodded.

“This won’t take more than a couple of minutes.”

And that is how the Sherman Park murders were solved: by a single question and a few keystrokes.

21

From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 26 June 2003

This is one of the most remarkable days I’ve ever lived through, and that includes Vietnam. In the morning, Jimbo finally told me Mark’s secret, then Omar Hillyard told me the secret of the secret. In the afternoon, I “assisted” in the arrest, as the police say, of the Sherman Park Killer. One other remarkable event occurred, and it has kept my spirits afloat ever since. Franz Pohlhaus and Philip believe that the mystery of Mark’s disappearance has been almost completely resolved, the final certainty to come with the discovery of his body. (Before that can happen, Ronnie Lloyd-Jones is going to have to admit his guilt and get around to telling Pohlhaus where he buried the rest of the bodies. As of this evening, he shows no interest in doing either.) I don’t agree with them, but for once I’m keeping my opinion to myself. And even if Mark’s body turns up in Ronnie Lloyd-Jones’s backyard, his body is not all that is left of him. Mark said something to Jimbo about the part of Joseph Kalendar that was left behind, and that gives me a way to say what I know: the part of Mark Underhill that was left behind is with her.

Jimbo tried to run when he saw me walking up, but the combination of conscience and his mother brought him back. Margo told me he was somewhere in the house, and the slamming of the screen door brought us into the kitchen. I followed her out into the backyard. Bustling down the alley, Jimbo looked over his shoulder and knew instantly that he had been busted. He stopped moving and let his shoulders slump.